Samsung introduced the Galaxy A series a few years ago - just ahead of the major reboot that was the Galaxy S6, in fact. It was the first line of devices Samsung built with a full metal body design, and on top of that it was a trio designed to fill the lower, medium, and upper-medium tiers of the smartphone market with the Galaxy A3, Galaxy A5, and Galaxy A7 respectively. The phones were quite well received by consumers, enough to warrant several successive generations since then, and now a new generation is coming inside 2018.
We've caught a whiff of the middle-brother of the group, the Galaxy A5 (2018), which has been spotted in the Geekbench benchmarking database wearing the SM-A530F label and a new Exynos 7885 chipset. This chip has not yet been announced, but it's the successor model to the Exynos 7880, with both being 14nm SoCs, however, while the new model will once again be an octa-core chip it will upgrade the old hardware with two ARM Cortex-A73 cores teamed with six ARM Cortex-A53's; the 7880 simply had eight A53's.
The news also implies something interesting, it seems that the A-Series may be going the way of Samsung's lead flagship brands in having two different processors depending on region. A previous set of benchmark results for the Galaxy A5 (2018) had the model number SM-A5300 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor. With Samsung's flagships it also usually goes with a Qualcomm/Exynos split; in recent years the US market has used Qualcomm while International models use Exynos, however, it has been the other way round in the past too.
The benchmark also shows the new 2018 Galaxy A5 will have a RAM boost up to 4GB or 6GB depending on which variant. Android Nougat 7.1 is onboard, and if this year is any indicator it will probably launch in Q1 2018 well before the Galaxy S9 flagship breaks cover.
by pbriden via Featured Articles
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