Samsung readying 5nm Exynos 1280 to supercharge affordable phones

Samsung may soon announce a new 5nm chipset for entry-level smartphones, says insider Ice Universe. Called Exynos 1280, the SoC will slot below the company’s first 5nm chip, the Exynos 1080, which was announced in November 2020.

Beyond revealing that a chip is around the corner, the leaker hasn’t shared much else. The Exynos 1080 is an octa-core processor with one Arm Cortex-A78 core running at 2.8GHz, three Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.6GHz, and four Cortex-A55 cores. Vivo appears to be the only company using the chip, but given that Samsung reportedly plans to increase the proportion of its phones that employ home-brewed Exynos chips, it’s possible that the Exynos 1280 will fuel upcoming affordable phones from Samsung,

Ice had previously said Samsung would introduce three chips in 2021: an entry-level 8xx chip, a mid-tier 12xx silicon (possibly Exynos 1080’s successor), and a flagship 22xx chip, likely the Exynos 2200 with an AMD GPU that will fuel the Galaxy S22 series that will be unveiled early next year. 

The first step the Korean titan took was retiring Mongoose CPU cores in favor of Arm’s designs, and now, it’s all set to boost graphics with the AMD GPU. The company also seemingly played a big part in the development of Tensor, Google’s first custom chip that powers the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. In fact, it appears that the Tensor is actually an Exynos variant.