Internal tests of the Exynos 2700 have Samsung LSI buzzing – the chipset outperformed Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 (both of them, actually), according to anonymous insiders. The testing was pretty thorough and included CPU, GPU, NPU and power efficiency benchmarks.
First, let’s clear this up – Qualcomm has officially confirmed that there will be two Elite chips in the next generation. They are tentatively being called the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro. This is separate from the non-Elite Gen 6 chip, by the way. Oh, and Qualcomm also confirmed a price hike for its chips.
The current Exynos 2600
Back to the tests – the Exynos 2700 CPU reportedly scored 9.5% higher on Geekbench 6.5 (multi-core) than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro and 19% higher than the non-Pro.
We don’t know which bench was used for the GPU test, but it gave the Samsung chip a 5% higher score than Qualcomm’s Pro chip. Interestingly, another test was run, this one under a 2.5W power limit – in this case the GPU outscored its Snapdragon rivals by 22% (Elite Pro) and 24% (Elite).
This shows that Samsung is thinking about power efficiency. To that end, the company simulated real-world smartphone use and found that the Exynos 2700 was drawing 161mA current, compared to 185mA for the Elite Pro.
These days the AI test is as important as the other two – using Llama 3.1 8B, the Exynos 2700 reportedly produced answers 18% faster than the Snapdragon chip.
There’s a reason that we mentioned the Qualcomm price hike above – while Samsung’s LSI (chipset design) and MX division (smartphone design) operate independently, MX can still buy flagship Exynos chips cheaper than it can flagship Snapdragon chips.
This incentivizes the use of Exynos chips where possible. Maeil Business shares this graph that shows that Exynos chips are used in 16% to 18% of Samsung phones (bottom right). The money spent on said Exynos chips has varied quite a bit over the years (bottom left, in trillion KRW). And as you can see, MX has a long way to go this year to match the spend last year – again, Samsung saves money by equipping an Exynos chip over a Qualcomm one.
That means that we’re quite likely to see Exynos-powered Galaxy S27 models next year in Korea, Europe and perhaps other regions – especially if these benchmarks prove accurate. Also, which of the five new foldables that Samsung has planned for next year do you think will use Exynos?
By the way, the Exynos 2700 will reportedly be produced on the SF2P node, Samsung’s second generation 2nm Gate-All-Around node. A well-performing smartphone chip will be a great advertisement that can bring in companies looking for a semiconductor fab.
