Samsung details Exynos 1280, promises better mid-range phones
Samsung has been making Exynos chipsets for years, some of which have been successful and others not so much. It toyed with making custom ARM CPU cores for about four years, but it dropped that fantasy in 2020 with the release of the flagship Exynos 980. There haven’t been any mid-range Exynos parts in the last two years, leaving cheaper Samsung phones without a modern in-house option. That changed a few weeks back with the announcement of the Exynos 1280, but only now has Samsung explained what makes this mobile chipset special.
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Samsung also promises smoother gaming performance with the chip’s Valhall-based ARM Mali-G68 GPU. Optimization for this architecture is still limited, but it should have better battery life than past designs thanks to a technology called Fused Multiply-Add (FMA), which can perform multiple floating-point operations in a single step. There’s an AI accelerator on board for local ML processing. It manages up to 4.3 trillion operations per second (TOPS), which is in the same neighborhood as the Hexagon DSP in Qualcomm’s 750G chipset.
The A53 only has a 64MP primary camera, but the Exynos 1280 supports up to a 108MP sensor. That’s the kind of hardware we’re used to seeing on Samsung’s flagship phones, but such components are already coming down in price. It can also handle a quad-camera setup, which the A53 and A33 technically have, even though one of them is a near-useless depth sensor. The 1280 can also do 4K video recording at 30 fps, but that’s no surprise having seen the A53.
There have only been a few Exynos 1280 phones so far, but no doubt we’ll see Samsung use this hardware a lot as 2022 continues. See below for the (mostly) full specs as posted by Samsung.
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