Exynos 1680 is here: Is Samsung’s Galaxy A57 chip any good?

Samsung has just announced the Galaxy A37 and Galaxy A57, with the latter powered by the in-house Exynos 1680 chipset. The company has also peeled the curtain back on this processor, giving us a good idea of what it’s capable of.

Samsung Semiconductor recently posted the Exynos 1680 product page, and a fleeting glance suggests that this is an iterative upgrade over the Exynos 1580 seen in the Galaxy A56. For one, it’s still built on a 4nm manufacturing process.

We don’t see any massive changes on the CPU front, either, as Samsung sticks with the Cortex-A720 and Cortex-A520 cores. However, the Exynos 1680 adopts a 1+4+3 core layout in lieu of the Exynos 1580’s 1+3+4 layout. In other words, the new chip swaps one of the little cores for a medium core. That should enable better multi-core performance, which is always welcomed for tasks like video encoding and emulation.

Samsung’s new chip also offers an Xclipse 550 GPU based on AMD’s RDNA 3 technology. The company claims this GPU is 16% faster than the Xclipse 540 seen in the Exynos 1580, despite both GPUs featuring two work group processors. That’s good news, as colleague Ryan Haines wasn’t impressed with the Galaxy A56‘s performance during his time with the phone.

The Exynos 1680 also sports an upgraded NPU, topping out at 19.6 TOPs compared to the old SoC’s 14.7 TOPs. That’s not a huge leap, but this is still encouraging news if you want more robust local AI experiences on your mid-range Galaxy phone. Then again, the Galaxy A57 isn’t exactly brimming with Galaxy AI features.

Other notable upgrades include support for faster RAM and storage standards (LPDDR5X and UFS 4.1), as well as Bluetooth 6.1 (up from Bluetooth 5.4). Otherwise, the Exynos 1680 seems identical to last year’s SoC in other areas. That means support for 200MP single camera setups, 32MP+32MP dual-camera systems, 4K/60fps capture, and FHD+ screens running at 144Hz.

The Exynos 1680 currently ships in the Galaxy A57, but Samsung tends to play the hand-me-down game with the Galaxy A3x series. So don’t be surprised if this chipset powers the Galaxy A38 or A39 down the line. Either way, it looks like the Pixel 10a and its Tensor G4 chipset are more than a match for the new Exynos chip.