Lately, Samsung has been facing backlashes because of its strategy of launching its flagship devices with different processors based on the market. Different tests have shown that Samsung’s in-house Exynos chipset is trailing behind its Snapdragon counterpart when it comes to performance and battery efficiency. However, Samsung may have found a way to fix this. Rumors suggest that Exynos 1000 has overpowered the Snapdragon 875 in Geekbench tests.
Exynos 1000 vs Snapdragon 875
Architecture
Exynos 1000 and Snapdragon 875 are the upcoming flagship processor from Samsung and Qualcomm, respectively. The biggest news here is Samsung’s decision to discontinue its in-house Mongoose cores. The two processors will feature 8 cores in a 1+3+4 arrangement. Samsung and Qualcomm have both gone for ARM’s latest Cortex X1. However, it has been reported that Samsung, on witnessing a problem with the new core, decided to clock it even higher. Rumors suggest the setup will be completed with three Cortex A78 cores and four Cortex A55 cores. It is not just the core setup, the Exynos 1000 and Snapdragon 875 will both be based on Samsung’s 5nm process. 
The two processors will feature different graphics units. Qualcomm is expected to include its Adreno GPU while Samsung will still be relying on Mali GPU. Unfortunately, we will only be able to witness Samsung flagships with AMD’s custom GPU starting from 2022. An early leaked suggested that the first custom made AMD GPU will offer thrice the performance of Adreno GPU on the SD 865.
Comparison
Earlier, a well-known tipster Ice Universe acknowledged the fact that Exynos 1000 (code-named Olympus) will still lag behind SD 875 in terms of CPU and GPU. According to him, the SD 875 will even overpower the A14 Bionic chipset on the iPhone 12 lineup. However, recently, he tweeted that Samsung has improved power efficiency greatly. And that the user will no longer have to worry about getting an Exynos variant.
A post on a Korean forum has now gone viral where the author claims he has access to early Geekbench results of two units of the upcoming Galaxy S21 (powered by Exynos and Snapdragon, respectively) and Xiaomi Mi 11 (powered by SD 875). According to the post, the SD 875-powered S21 outperformed the Mi 11 in the single-core test (1159 > 1102) but on the other hand, lagged behind in the multi-core test (4113 > 4090).
The biggest surprise comes from the Exynos-powered S21 which managed to defeat both SD 875-powered S21 and Mi 11. It managed to score 1302 points in the single-core test and 4250 points in multi-core tests. The architecture of both the processor is almost similar. Thus, the higher score of the Exynos 1000 is because of the higher clocked prime cores. Yet, we will have to wait a while to actually verify if said claims are true or not.
- Check out our review of Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra.
