Samsung processor ready to take the lead

It is believed that Samsung Exynos mobile processors are always inferior to their Qualcomm Snapdragon counterparts. In the Galaxy S20, it was the Exynos 990, in the Galaxy A21s, the Exynos 850. Similar Snapdragon models have always led the way in terms of performance and low power consumption. The situation may change with the appearance of Samsung Galaxy S21 devices on the Exynos 2100 processors in Russia and Snapdragon 888 in the USA. Samsung paid special attention to its chip during the announcement, promising to raise the bar of standards.

This is a bold statement that many were skeptical about. Of course, the Exynos 2100 has been improved over previous generations of Exynos flagships, but such improvements are typical. There is support for a 5G modem, a screen with a refresh rate of 144 Hz, a powerful Cortex-X1 core. The chip is produced on the 5 nm process technology. All this gives hope for real competition with the Snapdragon 888.

First, let’s compare the performance of the new processor with the Exynos 990 in the Galaxy S20. In Geekbench 5 multi-core testing, the new chip scored 3263 points against 2299 points in the past. That’s a nice performance boost for one year. PCMark Work 2.0 benchmarks show a value of 14732 versus 11000 in the Exynos 990. The increase is more than that of the new Snapdragon compared to its predecessor.

However, you need to compare with a competitor, not two processors from Samsung itself. The comparisons are shown below:

Geekbench 5

Single core testing

• S21 Snapdragon 888: 1076
• S21 Exynos 2100: 1070

Multi-core testing

• S21 Snapdragon 888: 3223
• S21 Exynos 2100: 3263

PCMark Work 2.0

• S21 Snapdragon 888: 13070
• S21 Exynos 2100: 14732

The picture is now clearer. In one test, Exynos has a clear advantage, in the other a minimal advantage, in the third a microscopic lag.

The graphics performance of the Exynos 2100 on the Mali GPU is also impressive.

3D Mark Wildlife

• S21 Snapdragon 888: 5733
• S21 Exynos 2100: 5852

In heavy graphics tasks, the Snapdragon 888 does better as you can see from the results below.

GFXbench Aztec Ruins Vulkan

• S21 Snapdragon 888 (High): 35 fps
• S21 Snapdragon 888 (Normal): 55 fps
• S21 Exynos 2100 (High): 26 fps
• S21 Exynos 2100 (Normal): 35 fps

Thus, the Exynos 2100 is at least not inferior to the Snapdragon 888 and even narrows the gap from the Apple A14 Bionic, although the gap between the latter is still large.

In terms of autonomy, the Exynos 2100 still has room to grow. Work 2.0 benchmarks with 200 nits screen brightness and adaptive refresh rate enabled on Snapdragon 888 show a result of almost 10 hours, on Exynos 2100 8 hours. In both cases, the smartphone can last a full day, but Samsung still needs to work on energy efficiency.

These results make us look forward to the Exynos 2200 even more impatiently, especially since there should be AMD Radeon graphics. Although benchmarks do not always reflect the performance in reality, we see a significant increase in the speed of the central processor