Samsung Exynos 1680 powers Galaxy A57 with modest upgrades over 1580

Samsung has unveiled its latest chipset, the Exynos 1680, which will power the upcoming Galaxy A57 smartphone. While this new system-on-chip largely resembles last year’s Exynos 1580, it brings a few noteworthy upgrades rather than a complete overhaul. The main change lies in the CPU core arrangement, which shifts from a 4+4 setup to a 1+4+3 configuration, featuring five Cortex-A720 cores and three Cortex-A520 cores. Clock speeds for these clusters remain unchanged, signaling a careful balance between performance and efficiency.

The graphics component, Samsung’s Xclipse 550 GPU, promises a 16% boost in performance over its predecessor, the Xclipse 540 GPU. However, the fundamental GPU architecture shows no radical change-both GPUs include two WGP blocks based on RDNA 3 architecture, equating to four compute units and 256 stream processors. This suggests that the performance gains stem from optimizations rather than hardware redesign.

Memory support has been upgraded from LPDDR5 to LPDDR5X, offering higher data transfer rates, and storage has moved from UFS 3.1 to UFS 4.1, which should improve load times and responsiveness. Display capabilities remain at Full HD+ with refresh rates up to 144 Hz, while camera support sustains up to 200 megapixels. Video encoding and decoding capabilities continue to support 4K video at 60 frames per second.

Connectivity features stay consistent with Bluetooth 6.1 and Wi-Fi 6E support, and the manufacturing process remains a 4 nm node, indicating that Samsung prioritized incremental refinement over a groundbreaking leap with this SoC. This approach reflects a wider trend in mid-range chipsets where manufacturers fine-tune existing architectures to extract better efficiency and performance without reinventing the wheel.

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With these adjustments, the Exynos 1680 fits well into the competitive mid-tier segment, targeting users who want decent power without the flagship price tag. The Galaxy A57, launching soon, will be among the first devices to showcase these modest but meaningful improvements.