Samsung Exynos 1480 vs Allwinner A523

The Samsung Exynos 1480 is a system on a chip (SoC) for mid-range smartphones and tablets based on Android. The CPU is made up of two clusters, each consisting of four cores. Four Cortex-A78 power cores (up to 2.75 GHz) and four Cortex-A55 power cores (up to 2.05 GHz) are used. The integrated graphics unit (GPU) is a Samsung Xclipse 530. The chipset supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Both LPDDR4x and LPDDR5 can be connected as RAM. UFS 3.1 is possible as internal memory.

The performance of the new AI engine with 6K MAC NPU is said to be around four times higher than its predecessor. In addition, displays with up to 144 Hz and Full HD+ can be used and cameras with up to 200 MPix are supported. The improved ISP now also enables videos in Ultra HD with up to 60 frames per second and is also capable of HDR and zero-shutter lag (ZSL).

The integrated modem has again received a significant speed boost for downloads and is considerably faster for both 5G-Sub6 (download: up to 5.1 GBit/s, upload: up to 1.28 GBit/s) and 5G-mmWave (download: up to 4.84 GBit/s, upload: up to 0.92 GBit/s), but remains unchanged for uploads since the Exynos 1280. There are no changes for LTE (Cat. 18, download: up to 1.2 GBit/s, upload up to 0.211 GBit/s).

The Exynos 1480 is manufactured by Samsung using the 4 nm process (Samsung 4LPP).

The Allwinner A523 is a very affordable ARM-based SoC for smartphones and tablets. The eight-core processor presented in 2023 consists of two quad-core clusters, each made up of 4 Cortex-A55 cores.

The faster quad cluster operates at a clock frequency of up to 1.8 GHz and offers 128 KB L2 cache per A55 core, while the second cluster clocks at up to 1.4 GHz and only offers 64 KB L2 cache per core.

In another version of the Allwinner A523, the first quad cluster clocks at up to 2.0 GHz. The ARM Mali-G57 MC1 is used as the graphics unit, which supports OpenGL 3.2, Vulkan 1.0 and OpenCL 2.0. A XuanTie E906 RISC-V PMU is also integrated.

The Allwinner SoC can control up to 4 GB DDR3/DDR4/LPDDR2/LPDDR3/LPDDR4/LPDDR4X RAM and eMMC 5.1 flash memory. In addition to PCIe 2.1, USB 3.1 Gen. 1 and Gigabit Ethernet are also supported as interfaces. There is also an H264/H265 video decoder (up to 4K at 60 frames per second) and an H264 encoder (up to 4K at 25 frames per second).

The Allwinner A523 is manufactured with a 22 nm structure width.