Samsung is competitive again: its SoC for mid-range smartphones goes as fast as those for the top of the range
After a few years in which it seemed to be struggling because of the breath on the neck exerted by Qualcomm with its Snapdragon processors, Samsung now seems to be back in a position to compete on equal terms. Samsung's new Exynos 1080 chip has shown excellent performance in the first benchmarks.
Exynos 1080 will be the successor to Exynos 980, a chip with 5G connectivity that equips the Samsung Galaxy A71 5G, Galaxy A51 5G but also the Vivo S6 5G, X30 and X30 Pro. But if the 980 is competing with the Snapdragon 765G, which is an SoC for mid-range smartphones, the future Exynos 1080 can give a hard time even to higher-ranking phones: in early tests, in fact, has shown performance comparable to those of Snapdragon 865 + and Apple A14 Bionic.
Samsung Exynos 1080: what it will be like
There are still no official technical specifications of the Exynos 1080, but it is assumed that it will consist of six Cortex-A78 and four Cortex-A55 CPUs, while the GPU will be the Mali-G78. It will also be a chip that will consume little, thanks to the 5 nm manufacturing process, the same used by Qualcomm for the upcoming Snapdragon 875 and by Apple for the A14 Bionic.
Samsung Exynos 1080: performance
On the well-known benchmark platform for mobile devices AnTuTu appeared the test of a device called "Orion", with 8 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage and Android 11 operating system. The technical specifications of the processor and GPU are the same as assumed for the Exynos 1080, so there are many who bet that this device integrates just the new chip from Samsung.
The test results are excellent: 693,600 total points, 181,099 points for the CPU and 297,676 for the GPU. The best Android top-of-the-line tested in September on AnTuTu, the ROG Phone 3 with Snapdragon 865+ and 12 GB of RAM, stopped at 642,671 total points.
Apple's A14 Bionic, also on AnTuTu, doesn't go beyond 572,333 points. The Kirin 9000 that's coming to market with the Huawei Mate 40, on the other hand, performs virtually identically to the Exynos: 693,605 points.
Samsung Exynos 1080: top of the line or midrange?
Samsung's upcoming midrange, then, is just as fast as this year's tops. But it won't be able to compete with next year's, against which the Exynos 2100 will compete instead. Very little is known about this SoC yet and there are no reliable benchmarks, because only pre-production samples have been tested.
It's clear, though, that Samsung has changed course and is finally back in the Olympus of smartphone chipmakers.