Galaxy S27's Exynos chip reportedly beats Snapdragon in tests, but we have many questions

Samsung is expected to offer the Galaxy S27 series with either Snapdragon or in-house Exynos silicon next year. The company typically offers a Snapdragon variant in markets like the US and China, while Europe and Korea get the Exynos model. However, a new report suggests that the Exynos variant could be the one to get if you value horsepower. But we still aren’t completely sold on these claims.

Chosun Biz reports that Samsung conducted internal tests between an Exynos 2700 device and the Xiaomi 18 Pro Max, which runs the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset. The Exynos chip reportedly  beat the Xiaomi device by 20% in Geekbench 6.5’s multi-core CPU test. The Samsung-powered device also apparently achieved a 15% higher multi-core score in GeekBench 7.0. Furthermore, the Samsung-powered device apparently beat the Xiaomi 18 Pro (using the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip) by 44% and 36%, respectively.

For what it’s worth, the Exynos 2700 is tipped to offer a 10-core CPU, featuring two C2-Ultra big cores and eight C2-Pro cores with varying clock speeds. So we’re not surprised that the Exynos 2700 would beat the eight-core Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 series in terms of multi-core performance. However, this report completely fails to mention single-core CPU performance figures. Qualcomm usually beats Samsung in this category.

GPU claims sound impressive, at first

Otherwise, Chosun claims that the Exynos 2700 also delivered superior GPU performance in two tests. It asserted that “maximum processing performance of high-end games using the latest graphics technology” was roughly 20% higher than that of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 series. Meanwhile, “basic graphics computation performance” in general 3D games was 5% higher. The news outlet didn’t name these specific tests, but we’re guessing it could be the 3DMark Solar Bay and Wild Life tests, respectively.

But we still have questions about graphical performance. It’s unclear whether these were one-off GPU tests or stress tests. The former reveals peak performance, while the latter tracks performance stability over 20 minutes. The latter type of test is arguably more important, as it shows what kind of performance you can expect in a demanding gaming session.

It’s also worth noting that we still can’t draw definitive conclusions about the Exynos 2700’s performance against the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 series. Samsung’s reported comparison was only against the Xiaomi 18 Pro series, so other Snapdragon-powered phones might perform differently due to differences in performance profiles, thermal management, and other factors.

Either way, it’s clear that you should take this report with a significant pinch of salt. Aside from the missing single-core performance claims and our questions over the GPU test methodology, there’s also no word on factors like heating and battery life. We really can’t wait to get our hands on the Galaxy S27 series to see which chipset reigns supreme.