Samsung offers most of its high-end phones with two different chipsets in different markets, which leads to inevitable comparisons year after year. Last year’s Exynos 990 was a step behind the Snapdragon 865, especially in terms of battery life. This year, the difference is much less if we want to trust this last batch of benchmarks.
Gold reviewer ran the SPECint2006 benchmark on top chipsets over the past 12 months, giving us some interesting numbers to look at and compare. The benchmark determines the power consumption and performance of a cluster of cores in a chipset.
Despite its higher clock speed, the large Cortex-X1 core from Exynos gets 7% slower than the Cortex-X1 core from the Snapdragon 888. This leads to a 12% performance difference per watt in favor of the chip. Qualcomm. Looking at the Cortex-A78 mid-core 3-core cluster on both chipsets, the Exynos 2100 delivers 12% more performance, but at the cost of 52% more power consumption, making it 26% less efficient per watt.
Still so we use the benchmark to compare the Exynos 2100 to last year’s Exynos 990 and we see big improvements for the new chip. The 2100’s big core offers 22% more performance and 34% more efficiency.
Now let’s move on to a video comparison between a Galaxy S21 Ultra with the Exynos 2100 and the Snapdragon 888, which shows the processors trading blows in different benchmarks. The scores are close, but the Exynos turns out to be a bit cooler than the Snapdragon.
But the 888 has a big lead over the 2100 in terms of frames per second in graphics benchmarks. Samsung is looking to move away from the Mali GPUs it was using in favor of AMD’s.
Either way, the benchmarks show an intangible difference between Galaxy S21 Exynos and Snapdragon devices. Unlike last year where some markets got a better performing chip, this year it doesn’t matter which version you get.
