Comparison On Paper Exynos 2100 And Snapdragon 888

Exynos 2100 & Snapdragon 888

The Exynos 2100 was announced yesterday (January 13) as Samsung's newest flagship processor and is expected to make its debut in the Galaxy S21 series.

In other regions such as the United States and China, the Galaxy S21 series will be powered by a competing chipset from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 888.

So what are the differences between the two when compared on paper?

For your information, both the Exynos 2100 and the Snapdragon 888 are both 5nm chipsets and the switch to a smaller node size brings increased performance and reduced power consumption when compared to its predecessors.

Both also feature ARM CPU cores in the same 1 + 3 + 4 setup and have a built-in 5G modem. The following is a comparison of the specifications of the two processors.

CPU

Both chips share the same CPU core and share the same setup. However, the Exynos 2100 is the winner in this category because all of its CPU cores are clocked higher than the Snapdragon 888 processor.

GPU

Both have new GPU features which bring significant improvements over their predecessors.

We can see how the Mali-G78 performs on the Kirin 9000 and Exynos 1080 processors. However, even though all three chipsets have the same GPU, their performance varies due to the number of cores they have.

The Exynos 2100 has 14 GPU cores, four more than the Exynos 1080 but ten less than the Kirin 9000.

AnTuTu benchmark results also show that the Kirin 9000 24-core GPU differs only slightly from the Snapdragon 888's Adreno 660 GPU.

With the Exynos 2100's fewer cores, the spacing is expected to be wider, although it should be smaller than the distance between the Exynos 1080 because it has four more cores.

So even though the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 wins this category, there is still good news for fans of the Exynos 2100 as its GPU score will definitely surpass the Snapdragon 865 Plus.

The Exynos 1080 already has a higher GPU score (239,408 points) than the Snapdragon 865 Plus (236,287 points), so the Exynos 2100 has to widen the margins.

Artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence / AI)

In this category, the two scores are tied. The reason is, the Exynos 2100 triple-core NPU offers up to 26 trillion operations per second (TOPS), the same figure offered by Snapdragon 888's Hexagon 780.

ISP

The ISP on the Exynos 2100 offers some impressive features. From 200MP camera support, to 4K video recording support at 120FPS and 8K video playback at 60FPS.

This chipset is also the first in the industry to have support for the AV1 Decoder for 8K.

Whereas the Spectra 580 on the Snapdragon 888 also packs some strength. Not only does it support 200MP cameras as well, but it also has 8K video capture at 30 FPS, and 4K HDR recording with compute HDR.

Connectivity

Both manufacturers have decided to use the integrated 5G modem for their flagship processors. Both support both mmWave and sub-6GHz spectrum.

Samsung is not saying what Wi-Fi technology its new chipset supports but it should have Wi-Fi 6 but we don't know if it has Wi-Fi 6E like Snapdragon 888 has or not.

Conclusion

Samsung has done well with its chipset and fans are sure to be delighted. The chipset has a more powerful CPU than Snapdragon 888 and the ISP brings some significant improvements.

However, on the other hand, the Qualcomm chipset also has the advantage of a great GPU and ISP.

Based on the above comparisons, it can be concluded that the value is series or balanced, but in real world comparisons it could be different, it could be that the Snapdragon 888 is stronger or vice versa.