Samsung formally introduces Exynos 1480 with 53% faster AMD-based GPU

Let us take a look at what's new with the Exynos 1480.

Exynos 1480 is the first mid-range chip with AMD RDNA-based GPU

The Exynos 1480 is fabricated on Samsung Foundry's 4nm (4LPP+) process node, which is an improvement compared to the 5nm Exynos 1380 chip from last year. The new chip has four ARM Cortex-A78 CPU cores clocked at 2.75GHz and four ARM Cortex-A55 CPU cores clocked at 2GHz. Samsung says its new Exynos chip is 22% more power-efficient than its predecessor. It is compatible with LPDDR4x/LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage.

It is also the first mid-range Exynos chip to use AMD RDNA-based Xclipse 530 GPU. It can drive Full HD+ resolution displays at a refresh rate of 144Hz. While it was reported that this GPU uses AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, Samsung claims on its website that it uses the latest RDNA architecture, which is RDNA 3. So things aren't clear at the moment.

According to Samsung, the Exynos 1480 offers 53% faster GPU performance than the Exynos 1380. It also has advanced gaming features like Variable Rate Shading (VRS) and Super Resolution (frame upscaling). All of this should result in vastly superior gaming performance compared to previous mid-range Exynos chips.

Its Image Signal Processor (ISP) supports up to 200MP camera sensors. It can process frames from two camera sensors (32MP + 32MP) simultaneously with zero shutter lag (30fps) or one 64MP camera sensor with zero shutter lag and HDR. It can record 4K 60fps videos, which is a major improvement over the Exynos 1380 which could only go as high as 4K 30fps.

The built-in AI Engine (NPU) has 4x faster on-device AI performance than the Exynos 1380. The Exynos 1480 also has a built-in 5G model with mmWave and sub-6GHz network compatibility. Its maximum theoretical download speed can reach up to 5.1Gbps, which is 2x faster than the Exynos 1380. Its maximum upload speeds can reach up to 1.28Gbps.

Other connectivity features of the Exynos 1480 include GNSS (BeiDou, Galileo, GLONASS, and GPS), Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, and USB Type-C port.