- Exynos 2100 ships with Samsung’s flagship smartphones.
- Snapdragon 888 is the fastest System on Chip by Qualcomm.
- Exynos 2100 is quite powerful but loses to Snapdragon 888.
Samsung probably wants to prove to its loyal customer base that it’s Exynos 2100 is not a hot mess like the case with the Exynos 990, running in the Galaxy S21 Ultra. Two Galaxy S21 Ultra models are pitted against each other to see how good the SoC fares. It’s no secret that Samsung fans around the world dislike the fact that Exynos models of the company’s flagship phones are used in some nations. We see Snapdragon versions of pretty much every Sammy flagship here in the United States, including the Galaxy S21 line this year.
Gary Sims pits the best-of-the-best in the Android world against each other in the new Speed Test G game. The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Snapdragon vs Exynos bout helps answer the question of whether the Snapdragon 888 can be beaten by the Exynos 2100 or not.
Did Exynos beat Snapdragon?
“No” is the easy answer: the Exynos 2100 loses handily. The Snapdragon 888, however, initially lags behind the Exynos 2100, presumably due to the overclocked CPU of the latter chip. It’s only when GPU tests begin that we see the trail behind the Exynos version.
While the Exynos 2100 in the CPU test marginally beats the Snapdragon 888, in the ‘mixed’ test it’s slower, as that slightly stresses the GPU. As seen in the outcomes below, the Achilles Heel for Samsung’s premium silicon is obviously the GPU. The Snapdragon 888’s Adreno 660 GPU does brief work on the 14-core Mali-G78 GPU. This means that it will have the edge over Qualcomm’s offerings if AMD and Samsung announce their joint graphics processor for smartphones in the future.
Snapdragon’s lead over Exynos SoC
For now, victory goes to the maker of the San Diego chipset. This is a good result for all those who were cheering for the Exynos 2100. Looking at the amount of flak obtained by Samsung for its Exynos 990, the Exynos 2100 is a remarkable enhancement. Both chipsets that participated in the test feature the same configuration of the CPU cluster and the version of Exynos showing better results may demonstrate the prowess of Samsung in the chipmaking division.
Samsung has more vigorously clocked its CPU cores, however. This suggests your day-to-day apps have a small performance gain. However, there is more at play than clock speeds. Factors such as sweet spots in the core and device cache also affect performance. Regardless, we should expect much closer efficiency and energy parity between Exynos and Snapdragon SoCs. Also, Samsung’s custom Mongoose cores are removed in this generation. Early benchmarks indicate that the Cortex-X1 is much beefier than the last-gen M5 core of Samsung. So in this respect, the Snapdragon catches up a lot.
