Samsung has been using its in-house Mongoose CPU cores in its Exynos chipsets since 2016. However, with the Exynos chips gradually falling behind Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips in most of the key areas including speed, battery performance, and graphics, the company is now moving away from this strategy.
Going forward, it’ll use standard ARM cores and this move appears to be bearing fruit already. Multiple reports have indicated that the next-gen flagship Exynos chipset will be superior to its Snapdragon counterpart in overall performance. And it’s not the recently announced Exynos 1080. This 5nm flagship-grade SoC has already beaten the Snapdragon 865+ in benchmark scores but there’s an even more powerful one in the works.
The Exynos 1080 was announced in China and is reportedly designed specifically for the local market. Samsung has a second 5nm chipset in the form of Exynos 2100 for the global market. It’ll be the most powerful of the two and will likely power the Galaxy S21 series.
Exynos 2100 could be the next-most-powerful mobile chipset
According to tipster Ice Universe, the Exynos 2100 will feature the ARM Cortex-X1 as the primary core, along with three Cortex-A78 cores, and four Cortex-A55 cores. While the Snapdragon 875 will also likely feature the same core architecture, the former reportedly beats it in benchmark tests. A report by South Korean publication Clien.net claims the Exynos 2100 scored 1,323 in the single-core test and 4,215 in the multi-core test.
The Snapdragon 875, meanwhile, comes second with scores of 1,204 and 4,121 points on the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. The report adds that the Snapdragon chip will slightly edge the Exynos 2100 in graphics performance. It packs an Adreno 660 GPU and will reportedly offer 10 percent better performance. The Exynos 2100 will likely come with Mali-G78 GPU.
While it’s still too early to be certain of this report, this overall CPU performance gap is an early indication that the revamped strategy is working out nicely for Samsung. If things turn out as they appear right now, then the Exynos 2100-powered Galaxy S21 could be the one to look out for.
This will also be beneficial for the whole smartphone industry. Qualcomm may finally have a real competitor in the flagship mobile chipset market. This competition should effect a drop in the prices of flagship chips.
That said, these are mere speculations as of now. Samsung has yet to confirm the Exynos 2100, though it has announced the Exynos 1080. It’s unclear why Samsung would want to introduce two flagship mobile chipsets around the same time. Perhaps the Exynos 2100 is a rebranded Exynos 1080 for the global market, we’ll probably get to know soon.