The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra could now plausibly be called the Galaxy S22 Note, but whatever it ends up being named, it’s likely to ship with a different chipset depending on region — the freshly announced Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 for some parts of the world, and Samsung’s own Exynos 2200 in others.
While you’re unlikely to have that much say in which you get — especially in times of a global chip shortage — it will still be interesting to see which performs better. And now we have a fuller picture as two listings for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 version seem to have appeared on Geekbench, to complement the Exynos 2200 we saw last month.
On the surface of things, and true to past form, it seems like a clear win for Qualcomm. The Samsung SM-S908U which packs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip and 8GB RAM reports a single-core score of 1,219 and a multi-core score of 3,154. By contrast, the Exynos 2200 version — SM-S908B — managed a marginally improved multi-core score of 3,167, but a far weaker single-core total of just 691.
While we’re here, there’s also a listing for SM-S908N — which is the same as the other Qualcomm chip, but with 10GB RAM. Other than it being another serial number to chew on (some have suggested it could be the Korean version), there’s not much more to add here, as the scores are from Geekbench 4, and thus the numbers — 6,908 and 15,079 — aren’t really comparable.
Ignoring that data point, it still feels like a slam dunk for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, right? Probably, but there are two important things to remember.
First, these are early benchmarks before the software has been optimized for both chips. The numbers can, and should, improve, and given the Exynos score emerged first, it likely has further to rise.
Secondly, early rumors point to the Exynos’ main strengths being in 3D rendering with talk of console style graphics and even ray tracing effects on mobile. These things aren’t picked up by Geekbench, so even if the numbers do remain broadly the same, it’s still only half time in the battle between the two chips.
Apart from the chip performance, the quantity of RAM is something of a puzzle. Recent rumors point to the Samsung Galaxy S22 Note as having 12GB and 16GB of RAM, and certainly the 8GB and 10GB listed above would feel weak for a Samsung flagship. For reference, last year’s S21 and S21 Plus came with 8GB, while the S21 Ultra packed 12/16GB, so it would be a strange backwards step.
We’ll have to wait and see what Samsung officially announces next year. We shouldn’t have too long to wait, with a number of leakers coalescing around the reveal and launch both occurring in February 2022.
