Multiple reports suggest Exynos based Samsung Galaxy S21 is the one to look out for

By Bianca On Mar 7, 2022

Exynos driven Samsung flagships often lag behind their Snapdragon-powered counterparts in speed, battery performance, and graphics. The gap has grown so much that even the South Korean bound models of the Galaxy S20 and Galaxy Note 20 have reportedly been equipped with a Snapdragon chip. The company was grilled by customers and shareholders alike about this and all that criticism appears to be bearing fruit.

Samsung’s recently announced midtier chip, the Exynos 1080, has already beaten the Snapdragon 865 Plus. And it now looks like the Exynos 2100, which will seemingly fuel the Galaxy S21, will also leave behind the Snapdragon 875.

Respected tipster Ice Universe has now reiterated that the Exynos 2100 will have Arm’s Cortex-X1 as its primary core. The Snapdragon 875 will reportedly have the same main core. The Cortex-X1 offers 30 percent better performance than Snapdragon 865’s Cortex-A77 core.

A strong evidence shows that Exynos2100 will adopt the Cortex-X1 architecture. The reason is that the code 3396 appeared in Geekbench. Converting it to hexadecimal is d44, and d44 corresponds to the Cortex-X1 architecture. pic.twitter.com/yXKPggDm3O
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) October 10, 2020

Although both chips will benefit from the new core, the improvement in the performance of the Exynos 2100 will be more noticeable. That’s because the Exynos 990, which is the beating heart of Samsung’s current premium phones, employs proprietary Mongoose cores, which are not a patch on Arm’s cores.

The company has now disbanded its custom CPU team and it will now likely use Arm’s CPU as Qualcomm does.

Galaxy S21 benchmark scores

Per leaked benchmark scores posted on a South Korean website, the Exynos 2100-fueled Galaxy S21 will perform better than the Snapdragon-based model.

The Snapdragon variant apparently scored 1,204 and 4,121 points on the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. The Exynos model beat this with a single-core score of 1,323 and a multi-core score of 4,215.

Although the difference in the scores is not huge, the supposed results are significant because they suggest the Exynos 2100-powered models will be faster this year.

The Exynos 2100 is expected to feature the Mali-G78 GPU, and per a new leak, it will be about as good as Snapdragon 875’s Adreno 660 GPU. Qualcomm’s chip will still likely maintain an edge, and per one report, it will offer about 10 percent better graphics performance than the Exynos 2100.

Similar to Snapdragon875 [email protected]
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) October 10, 2020

Samsung is apparently so optimistic about its new flagship chip that it is planning to migrate South Korean models back to proprietary SoCs.

Overall, this is great news not just for European and Middle Eastern Samsung fans, but also for the entire smartphone industry. Qualcomm currently leads the market, and it has slowly been increasing the price of its premium chips, as a result of which some prominent vendors have temporarily abandoned their flagship ambitions.

Samsung already sells its SoCs to a few mobile vendors and it is reportedly planning to expand shipments in 2021.

What do you think?