Samsung recently announced its Galaxy A53 5G smartphone. The new mid-range smartphone from the company offers a lot for its affordable price and is already available for purchase. At the launch, Samsung only detailed that the Galaxy A53 5G (and a few other A-series smartphones) is powered by its own new Exynos 1280 chipset. However, the company did not release any details of its latest in-house silicon back then. Today, the company finally opened up and released some details about the Exynos 1280 chipset giving us an idea of how it compares with the mid-range chipsets from Qualcomm and MediaTek.

But before we go ahead and see how the Exynos 1280 lines up against the Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G and MediaTek Dimensity 8100 chipsets — the most popular chipsets in the affordable smartphones — let's take a look at what the latest Samsung chipset has to offer.

Exynos 1280: Features

Samsung Exynos 1280 is the first affordable SoC from the company that is based on the 5nm node process. Samsung says the 5nm node architecture offers a low-power design making the chipset more power-efficient than the previous generation A-series phones. Talking about the architecture, the Exynos 1280 offers an octa-core CPU that comes with two ARM Cortex A78 cores and six ARM Cortex A55 cores. The company still hasn't disclosed the clock speed, however.

Samsung Exynos Featured image

Source: Samsung Exynos

On the GPU side of things, Samsung says the Exynos 1280 comes with Valhall-based ARM Mali-G68 graphics. A lot of users who have already purchased the Samsung Galaxy A53 have reported that the games are still not fully optimized for this GPU. Nevertheless, the company says that the Exynos 1280 should offer good battery life thanks to a technology called Fused Multiply-Add (FMA), which allows it to perform multiple floating-point operations in just a single step.

Even though the Galaxy A53 comes with a 64MP primary camera, Samsung says the Exynos 1280 can handle up to a 108MP single primary sensor. However, we highly doubt that Samsung will launch a mid-range smartphone with a 108MP camera. The maximum resolution of the front-facing camera that Exynos 1280 supports is 32MP. The chip can also handle 4K video recording at 30fps.

On paper, the Exynos 1280 looks like a great mid-range offering from Samsung. But, how does the Samsung Exynos 1280 stack up against Qualcomm's Snapdragon 778G and MediaTek's Dimensity 8100? Let's take a look.

Exynos 1280 Competitors

Qualcomm and MediaTek are the chipsets most commonly found in the affordable price range. Compared to the latest Snapdragon 778G, the Exynos 1280 offers better node architecture as the Samsung chipset is based on a 5nm node process, whereas the Snapdragon 778G is based on a 6nm node process. However, as we said in the chipset nanometer technology explainer, a smaller nanometer number doesn't necessarily mean better performance and efficiency.

However, the Samsung chipset loses when it comes to other features. For example, the Exynos 1280 only offers two ARM Cortex A78 cores whereas the Snapdragon 778 offers four A78 cores (with one core clocked at 2.5GHz). The 1280 also comes with only Wi-Fi 5, whereas the Snapdragon 778G can be configured with Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6, and Wi-Fi 6E. The Samsung chipset also offers the slower UFS v2.2 storage and LPDDR4x RAM, whereas 778G offers UFS 3.1 and LPDDR5 memory.

MediaTek Dimensity 8100

Source: MediaTek

When comparing against the MediaTek's newly launched Dimensity 8100, the Exynos 1280 wins when it comes to cellular connectivity as the Samsung chip supports both mmWave and sub-6GHz 5G while the MediaTek chipset only supports sub-6GHz 5G. However, the MediaTek Dimensity 8100 offers a newer Bluetooth version, more number of ARM A78 performance cores, faster memory and storage, and much more. Here's a simple table comparing all the three chipsets:

Exynos 1280 vs Snapdragon 778G vs Dimensity 8100: Technical Specifications

Category

Samsung Exynos 1280

Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G

MediaTek Dimensity 8100

Nanometer Technology

5nm

6nm

5nm

CPU (Max clock speed)

- 2x ARM Cortex A78
- 6x ARM Cortex A55

- 1x ARM Cortex A78 (2.5GHz)
- 3x ARM Cortex A78 (2.2GHz)
- 4x ARM Cortex A55 (1.9GHz)

- 4x ARM Cortex A78 (2.85GHz)
- 4x ARM Cortex A55 (2.0GHz)

GPU

ARM Mali-G68

Qualcomm Adreno 642L

ARM Mali-G610 MC6

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi 5

Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), Wi-Fi 5, 802.11a/b/g/n

Wi-Fi 6E

Bluetooth

Bluetooth 5.2

Bluetooth 5.2

Bluetooth 5.3

5G

mmWave and sub-6GHz

mmWave and sub-6GHz

sub-6GHz only

RAM

LPDDR4x

LPDDR5

LPDDR5

Storage

UFS v2.2

UFS 3.0, UFS 3.1

UFS 3.1

Camera

Up to 108MP in single camera mode

Up to 192 MP in single camera mode

Up to 200MP in single camera mode

Max Video support

4K 30fps

4K at 30FPS

4K

Display support

Full HD+@120Hz

FHD+ @ 144 Hz

FHD+ @ 168Hz / WQHD+ @ 120Hz

What are your thoughts on Samsung's latest Exynos chipset? Let us know in the comment section down below!

Source: Samsung