The flagship Android phones are phenomenal these days and the majority of the credit goes to the flagship processors that power these devices. If you look at top of the edge flagship processors or SoC(which is a fancy word for the processor and stands for System on a Chip) the three best offerings are Snapdragon 888, Exynos 2100, and Kirin 9000. So which one is the best flagship SoC out there? Let’s compare and find out.
The ultimate goal of the best flagship SoC is to be as compact as it can be and still perform better than the rivals and the previous version of itself. As mentioned, the three-best flagship SoC are Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888, which is recently announced and will be powering the best flagship devices of 2021 like the OnePlus 9(most probably) and brands like Xiaomi, Black Shark, and more.
Then there is Exynos 2100 which is Samsung’s very own made flagship processor. It is also announced recently and will be powering the best flagships of the Note, and S series from Samsung.
The final one is Kirin 9000 which is Huawei’s addition to the best flagship SoC race. It was announced in October this year with Mate 40 Pro and will be powering the Mate series flagship smartphones next year.
In this article, we are going to compare Snapdragon 888 vs Exynos 2100 vs Kirin 9000 to see which one is the best flagship SoC.
Snapdragon 888 vs Exynos 2100 vs Kirin 9000: Which is the Best Flagship SoC?
Basic Specifications
Let’s just have a rough idea of their specs. These processors are just announced so some of the specs are not confirmed yet.
Snapdragon 888 | Exynos 2100 | Kirin 9000 | |
CPU | Octacore 1x ARM Cortex-X1 @2.84GHz 3x ARM Cortex-A78 @2.42GHz 4x ARM Cortex-A55 @1.8GHz | Octacore 1x ARM Cortex-X1 @2.91GHz 3x ARM Cortex-A78 @2.81GHz 4x ARM Cortex-A55 @2.21GHz | Octacore 1x ARM Cortex-A77 @3.13GHz 3x ARM Cortex-A77 @2.54GHz 4x ARM Cortex-A55 @2.05GHz |
GPU | Adreno 600 | Mali G78 MP | Mali G78 24 Cores |
Process Technology | Samsung 5nm(5LPE) | Samsung 5nm(5LPE) | TSMC 5nm |
Modem | X60 integrated (5G NR Sub6 + mm Wave) DL= 7500 Mbps UL= 3000 Mbps | – | Balong 5000 4G + 5G NR NSA+SA Sub6GHz |
Memory | 3200MHz LPDDR5/51.2GB/s 3MB system level cache | – | LPDDR5/LPDDR4X |
Now that we have some of the necessary details about the processors, the most important thing to look out for is the benchmark scores of these processors.
Benchmark Scores
First of all, we are going to compare the scores from Geekbench. So, the Geekbench results for all of the three processors are:
Single Core | Multi Core | |
Snapdragon 888 | 1,135 | 3,681 |
Exynos 2100(Leaked) | 1,040 | 3,107 |
Kirin 9000 | 1,012 | 3,630 |
Now all of these processors can do all of the normal day-to-day tasks with ease. Now when we buy a flagship smartphone, we expect it to keep it for a long time. For that one has to make sure that their device is future proof. The situation with 5G is a little bit confusing but for sure it will be coming soon. Thankfully, all of the flagship processors that we are comparing are enabled with 5G capabilities so as soon as you will have 5G in your region, you will be able to use it easily.
Let’s look at the Antutu scores as well. In the table below we have provided the Antutu benchmark scores for all three processors:
Benchmark Score | |
Snapdragon 888 | 8,47,868 |
Exynos 2100 | – |
Kirin 9000 | 6,90,000 |
You see that even the Snapdragon 888 just blasts through the competition on benchmark scores. And comparing overall, Snapdragon 888 is just going to be the better processor on benchmark scores so we can say that Snapdragon 888 beats the two fairly on the benchmark. The Kirin 9000 has a very underwhelming performance compared to Snapdragon 888. Snapdragon is just better in every aspect as it has a better 5G modem, better CPU, and better GPU as well.
However, Exynos 2100 is expected to bring some competition to the Snapdragon 888 but as of now, we do not have many details about it so we cannot really say much about it. It is important to note that Exynos processors had complaints of being slower than their Snapdragon counterparts on the same Samsung smartphone so let’s see how better will the Exynos 2100 perform.
Final Verdict
The overall winner in the best flagship SoC competition between Snapdragon 888 vs Exynos 2100 vs Kirin 9000 is Snapdragon 888 as it just beats the rivals very fairly in every aspect. It is better than the Kirin 9000 and as more details are awaited about the Exynos 2100 we can say that the Snapdragon is better SoC compared to the other two.
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