Samsung unveils new Exynos mobile chips for midrange smartphones

Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest memory chipmaker, has unveiled a duo of new Exynos mobile application processor (AP) chips to power low- to mid-end smartphones.

The much-anticipated midrange chipsets – the Exynos 1380 and the Exynos 1330 – are successors to Samsung’s Exynos 1280 launched last year and offer significant performance improvements, the company said on Friday.

The latest system-on-chips (SoCs), manufactured with Samsung’s advanced 5-nanometer process technology, are expected to drive the company’s 5G-compatible budget Galaxy line of smartphones.

Specifically, the Exynos 1380 chipset will debut in the Galaxy A54 and the Galaxy M54 smartphones while the Exynos 1330 will be featured in more affordable Galaxy A14 smartphones, industry sources said.

Samsung said its new flagship mobile chipsets are designed for budget smartphones but made up of the latest components, offering faster performance.

The Exynos 1380 is equipped with a high-performance image signal processor (ISP) to support AI-based photography. It also provides an improved three-dimensional (3D) gaming environment with an enhanced graphics processing unit (GPU). Its central processing unit (CPU) comprises the ARM 4x Cortex-A78 and Cortex-A55 cores.

These improvements enable the Exynos 1380 to deliver up to 40% faster data processing speed and 20% faster game loading speed than its predecessor, according to Samsung.

TO CHALLENGE QUALCOMM, MEDIATEK

Samsung is unveiling the new Exynos chipsets as it faces an uphill battle against rivals such as Qualcomm Inc. and MediaTek Co. of Taiwan.

Qualcomm, the dominant player in the premium mobile AP chip market, supplies its latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip to Samsung to power its latest premium smartphone, the Galaxy S23 series.

MediaTek’s mobile AP chips are widely used in low-end smartphones made by Chinese companies.

A mobile AP is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed to support applications running in a mobile operating system environment.

Samsung generates the bulk of its memory business profit from making basic chips and has been beefing up the development of logic chips such as mobile processors, image sensors and automotive chips to diversify its business channels.

Samsung, also the world’s largest smartphone maker by volume, said it is doubling down on its efforts to develop next-generation AP chips exclusively used for its Galaxy line of smartphones.

Around the end of last year, Samsung’s LSI division, together with its MX division handling smartphones, set up the AP Solution Development Team to facilitate its R&D work on next-generation mobile AP chips.

Write to Sungsu Bae at baebae@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.