Exynos 1280 vs Snapdragon 695: The Samsung Galaxy A53's chipset is a mixed bag

Two weeks ago, Samsung officially debuted the Galaxy A53 with its new mid-range chipset, the Exynos 1280. While Samsung is yet to provide details of the SoC, it has now been put through a series of tests versus other chipsets like the Snapdragon 695.

Starting off with CPU performance, the Exynos 1280's Cortex-A78 cores get put through SPEC and deliver a rather miserable performance. The new Exynos chipset scores 25.74, a smidge above the Snapdragon 695's 25.36 and the Snapdragon 780's 25.62. While those numbers look to be solid, it all goes to waste when power consumption is considered. The Exynos 1280 drinks up 2.39 W, versus the Snapdragon 695's 1.22 W and the Snapdragon 780's 1.65 W. Those numbers tally up to the Snapdragon 695 being almost 100% more efficient than the Exynos 1280.

On a side note, those figures also show how far behind Samsung's node is. The Snapdragon 780 and Snapdragon 695 deliver identical performance, but the Snapdragon 695 is about 50% more efficient, likely thanks to TSMC's 6 nm manufacturing process versus the 5 nm Samsung node the Snapdragon 780 is built on. The fact that the Dimensity 1200, another chipset built on the same node as the Snapdragon 695, also shows similar efficiency numbers surely corroborates that theory.

It's not all doom and gloom for owners of devices powered by the Exynos 1280, however. While the chipset's CPU is rather inefficient, its Mali-G68 MP4 GPU performs quite well. On 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme test, the Exynos 1280 scores 640 versus the Snapdragon 695's 362. It manages to be about 25% more efficient as well. On GFXBench 3.1, however, both chipsets deliver similar performance and efficiency for some reason.

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