The new Galaxy S21 series has been on sale for a week now, and Anandtech managed to get their hands on two Galaxy S21 Ultras – one with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 888 SoC and one with Samsung’s new Exynos 2100 SoC. Both chipsets are similar, and have similar CPU configurations, but they also have some differences. See below for a detailed breakdown of the differences that Anandtech found when comparing the new generation of SoCs.
Snapdragon 888
Starting with the new Snapdragon 888 SoC, Qualcomm's new model comes with very big changes, with the biggest ones involving the new Hexagon 780 accelerator, which combines traditional scalar and vector DSP functions with tensor execution engines in a single "IP block".
Additionally, the Snapdragon 888 is among the first SoCs to use Arm's new Cortex-X1 CPU IP, promising big performance gains over the last-generation Cortex-A77 cores. The Snapdragon 888's individual X1 cores are clocked at 2.84GHz, the same as the first Cortex-A77s in the previous-generation Snapdragon 865, but less than the Snapdragon 865+ and the new Snapdragon 870, which have speeds of 3.1GHz and 3.2GHz respectively.
While we were expecting top-of-the-line 8MB L3 cache on SoCs this year, it seems Qualcomm has opted to stick with 4MB for this generation. On the GPU side, Qualcomm's new Adreno 660 GPU clocks at 840MHz – a whopping 43% higher frequency than the Snapdragon 865 GPU. The company promises a +35% performance.
What's very different about the Snapdragon 888 is that Qualcomm has moved from a TSMC N7P node to Samsung's new 5LPE node.
Exynos 2100
From Samsung LSI's side, comes the brand new Exynos 2100. The new Exynos is very important for Samsung's SoC division, as this is the first flagship produced in many years that returns to using Arm Cortex cores, which in this case are the new Cortex-X1 and Cortex-A78 cores.
The Exynos 2100's CPU configuration is almost identical to that of the Snapdragon 888, as both are 1+3+4 designs with X1, A78, and A55 cores. However, there are a few minor differences.
The Exynos 2100 features one ultra-high-performance core clocked at 2.91GHz, three high-performance clocked at 2.8GHz for optimal performance and power, and four energy-efficient cores clocked at 2.4GHz.
Now let's move on to the cache settings: the X1 cores only have 512KB L2 cache, which is a bit strange given the all-out-performance philosophy of the new CPU.
On the GPU side, we see a Mali-G78MP14 clocked at 854MHz. That means 27% more cores and 6.7% higher frequency – the company is promoting an overall improvement of around 40%.
Information source: anandtech.com
