Exynos 2100 vs Snapdragon 888: Here's how the chipsets fared on Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra benchmarking

Flagship Exynos chips have always struggled to keep pace with their Snapdragon counterparts on Samsung’s Galaxy S and Note phones. Last year’s Exynos 990 was a huge step down from the Snapdragon 865, falling short in both performance and power-efficiency. However, Samsung promised that this year things would be different, and it looks like the company is making good on its promise.

The SPECint2006 benchmark determines a chipset’s cluster of cores’ power draw and performance rating. Golden Reviewer has been running the benchmark on the best mobile platforms for the past 12 months.

The numbers show that the Cortex-X1 core on the Snapdragon 888 scores 7 percent better than the Cortex-X1 core on the Exynos 2100, translating to a 12 percent better performance per watt in favour of the Snapdragon 888 chip. When it comes to the cluster of 3x Cortex-A78 cores on both chips, the Exynos chip delivered 12 percent more performance at the expense of a 52 percent higher power draw, which makes it 26 percent less efficient per watt.

Despite falling marginally short against the Snapdragon 888, the Exynos 2100 is a big step up from last year’s Exynos 990, with the big core delivering 22 percent more performance and 34 percent higher efficiency. Additionally, a video released by PBKreviews also showed the Snapdragon 888 had a massive lead over the Exynos 2100 in terms of frames per seconds in the graphics benchmarks.

Samsung's shift from Mali GPUs to AMD ones seems like a move in the right direction. The benchmark’s show that the difference between Exynos and Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S21 phones is intangible. However, it doesn’t seem like much of a comprise like last year’s SD865 and Exynos 990.

In a separate video, the Exynos 2100 also delivered better power efficiency than the Snapdragon 888 on the S21 Ultra. The 30-minute battery test was separated into several stages. The Exynos 2100 did a better job of reducing battery drain at the end of the video. The margin is only a small 2 percent improvement, which may not be perceivable in real-world usage. But the test reveals that the Exynos version of S21 series won’t have the same battery woes compared to last year’s S20 series.