Samsung has officially unveiled its new mid-range Exynos 1680 chipset, painting a promising picture for the company’s upcoming non-flagship phones. The chip brings meaningful improvements, especially in the areas of AI and graphics, and will hit the market early next month with the recently announced Galaxy A57.
What’s new with the Exynos 1680?
The Exynos 1680 features an improved Samsung Xclipse 550 GPU, which should offer significantly better graphics performance than the Exynos 1580’s Xclipse 540 GPU. Samsung says the new GPU adds two additional render blocks alongside two workgroup processors, reportedly resulting in a 16% performance increase over last year’s model.
To improve AI performance, Samsung has equipped the Exynos 1680 with a new 8K MAC NPU that reportedly delivers performance of up to 19.6 TOPS, a 33% improvement over its predecessor. This should result in faster AI capabilities on the device.
Other notable upgrades include support for LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.1 storage, as well as Bluetooth 6.1 for improved connectivity.
What hasn’t changed much?
Like last year’s Exynos 1580, the new chip is based on Samsung’s 4nm process and features the same octa-core CPU. It includes a powerful Cortex-A 720 core with a clock speed of 2.9 GHz, three Cortex-A720 cores with a clock speed of 2.6 GHz and three Cortex-A520 efficiency cores with a clock speed of 1.95 GHz.
While the architecture remains unchanged, Samsung notes that one of the efficiency cores has been upgraded to a “mid-core” to better balance performance and efficiency. This could result in slightly better battery life in everyday use.
Display support is still limited to FHD+ with a 144Hz refresh rate, and camera features are the same too, with the Exynos 1680 supporting up to 200MP sensors and 4K video recording at 60fps. Connectivity features such as Wi-Fi 6E, GNSS and 5G NR are also adopted.
How these upgrades perform in real-world use remains to be seen when the Galaxy A57 is put to the test.
