Exynos 1580 unveiled with Cortex-A720 cores, double the GPU hardware

The Exynos 1480 was a cool mid-range chip – literally, its sustained performance was great. But it was only ever used in one phone, Samsung’s own Galaxy A55, which is a bit of a shame. Here’s what comes next – the Exynos 1580, likely to be used in the upcoming Galaxy A56.

This chip is a major upgrade over its predecessor – it’s built on a new node, with ARMv9 CPU cores and double the GPU hardware. Specifically, the chip is fabbed on Samsung’s third-generation 4nm EUV FinFET process.

The CPU of the Exynos 1580 moves to a three-cluster design with one prime Cortex-A720 core (2.9GHz), three big A720 cores (2.6GHz) and four A520 (1.95GHz). This alone represents a major performance boost compared to the 1480, which used ARMv8 cores.

The GPU is based on AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture, now featuring two Work Group Processors – up from just one on the 1480 (the Exynos 2400 has six). Samsung says that maximum performance is up by 37% while performance at the same power level as the 1480 is up by 20%. This GPU also increases the GL2 cache.

The NPU delivers 14.7 TOPS of performance. The 1380 had just 4.9 TOPS, while the 1480 went up to... Samsung doesn’t say. However, both the 1480 and 1580 NPUs are described as “6K MAC”, so presumably there’s no difference. The spec sheet does say the new NPU has an increased cache capacity of 2MB, but the effects of that will only be known after benchmarks.

The new chip supports LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage. Connectivity is mostly the same with 5G (both sub-6GHz and mmWave), Wi-Fi 6E (ax) and Bluetooth 5.4. There is no AV1 decoder.

Display and camera support are the same as before, up to 1080p+ at 144Hz and single 200MP cameras (or dual 32+32MP @ 30fps) with 4K video at 60fps. A 200MP camera on the Galaxy A56 seems unlikely, but Samsung does say that the new chip has improved image processing compared to its predecessor.

As we have alluded above, the Exynos 1580 is likely to be used in Samsung’s Galaxy A56, which is expected to be unveiled early next year (however, we’re already seeing benchmarks from it). It could also be featured in tablets, e.g. 2023’s Galaxy Tab S9 FE(+) used the Exynos 1380, but that’s just a guess at this point.

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