Samsung Exynos 1380 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 865

Samsung Exynos 1380

The Samsung Exynos 1380 is a system on a chip (SoC) designed for mid-range smartphones and tablets running on the Android operating system. The CPU is made up of two clusters, each consisting of four cores. It features four Cortex-A78 performance cores (up to 2.4 GHz) and four Cortex-A55 power-saving cores (up to 2.0 GHz). The integrated graphics unit is an ARM Mali-G68 MP5 with speeds of up to 950 MHz.

The NPU's performance has been improved by around 14 percent compared to its predecessor, with a capacity of 4.9 TOPS. Displays with up to 144 Hz and Full HD+ resolution can now be used, and the chipset supports cameras with up to 200 MPix. The chipset also includes Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3. Both LPDDR4x and LPDDR5 can be used as RAM, and UFS 3.1 is possible as internal storage.

The integrated modem has significantly increased download speeds, supporting both 5G-Sub6 (download: up to 3.79 Gbps (+32%), upload: up to 1.28 Gbps) and 5G-mmWave (download: up to 3.67 Gbps (+75%), upload: up to 0.92 Gbps). The upload speed for LTE (Cat. 18, download: up to 1.2 Gbps, upload: up to 0.211 Gbps (+5%)) has only been slightly improved.

The Exynos 1380 is manufactured by Samsung using the 5-nm process.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 865

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform is a high-end smartphone and tablet SoC that Qualcomm announced in December 2019. The SoC integrates a fast ‘Prime Core’ that clocks up to 2.84 GHz and three further fast ARM Cortex-A77 performance cores, which can reach up to 2.42 GHz. These are complemented by four power-saving ARM Cortex-A55 cores that clock up to a maximum of 1.8 GHz. The difference to the older Snapdragon 855 is the switch from Cortex-A76 to the faster Cortex-A77 architecture. The clock speeds stay the same. 

Therefore, the Snapdragon 865 takes the top spot in mobile processors for Android based systems. In some multi-core workloads, the SD865 can even perform on par with the Apple A13 SoC. Single thread, however is still a strong suit of the Apple SoCs.

Compared to the previous generations, the Snapdragon 865 does not integrate an LTE modem anymore, but has to be paired with the new X55 5G modem, that also supports LTE Cat 24/22. The Wi-Fi module however is still integrated and called FastConnect 6800 with support for Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and 8x8 MU-MIMU and 60 GHz 802.11ay with up to 10 Gbps. Bluetooth 5.1 is also supported including aptX Adaptive.

The integrated GPU is now called Adreno 650 and should offer 20% more performance than the Adreno 640 in the Snapdragon 855.

The on board Hexagon 698 DSP now offers an improved KI performance of up to 15 TOPS (up from 7 TOPS in the 855) and still uses a combination of CPU, GPU, HVX and Tensor cores. The Spectra 480 ISP is now also significantly faster. The integrated Computer Vision Engine (CV-ISP) now supports Dolby Vision, 8K videos and 200 megapixel photos.

The built-in memory controller now supports LPDDR5 with up to 2,750 MHz and LPDDR4X with 2,133 MHz.

The Snapdragon 865 is manufactured at TSMC in the new improved 7nm process (N7P, DUV-based). The process offers a 7% higher performance or 10% less power consumption compared to the old N7 process.