Samsung released dual variants of the Galaxy S22 flagship series with both — Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Exynos 2200. Which one is better?
Samsung recently unveiled Galaxy S22 series smartphones, marking a major paradigm shift in its flagship portfolio by consolidating the Galaxy S and the Galaxy Note series. Although the Galaxy S22 series did not include many hardware changes over the previous generation, performance gets a major boost with new 4nm chipsets. Like previous years, Samsung is retaining its dual-chipset policy for its flagship Galaxy S22 series and will be selling the flagship devices with chipsets varying as per region. While major markets such as the U.S., Canada, South Korea, and Hong Kong will get Galaxy S22 smartphones powered by Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 mobile platform, we can expect Samsung to task its own flagship Exynos 2200 chipset with powering the Galaxy S22 in other regions. As per tipster Dohyun Kim, the Galaxy S22 series will feature the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset in more regions, including North and South Americas and East as well as Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, regions such as the Middle East, West Asia, and Africa will get a mix of Exynos 2200 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, whereas Samsung will continue to sell the Galaxy S series in Europe with Exynos chips as earlier. While we can say for sure that the U.S. will get the Snapdragon variant of the Galaxy S22, chipsets for other regions cannot be confirmed at the moment until Samsung begins shipping these devices or device reviews start pouring in from other regions. While Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon chipsets have traditionally overpowered Exynos chipsets, the performance gap between Samsung’s flagship Exynos chips and Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon chips has reduced significantly, especially since the launch of Exynos 2100 in 2021. The Exynos 2200, which was announced last month, puts up a tough fight against the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 thanks to almost equivalent hardware. Samsung also makes major claims about its new custom GPU that has been designed in collaboration with AMD to offer more refined graphics on Samsung phones. As expected, while Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 powers multiple flagship smartphones, including the Xiaomi 12 series and the OnePlus 10 Pro besides the North American and Korean units of the Galaxy S22, the Exynos 2200 is limited to the Galaxy S22 series. With these considerations in mind, the following sections discuss how the two rivals compare. But before we dive in, here’s a quick comparison between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Exynos 2200. The Samsung Exynos 2200 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 are quite comparable when it comes to the CPU architecture. Both Samsung and Qualcomm are employing ARM’s licensable ARMv9 CPU designs IP for their flagship chipsets. Both also feature an octa-core design with a tri-cluster (1+3+4) arrangement of cores, using one ARM Cortex-X2 core as the primary performance core, three ARM Cortex-710 cores for tasks with middling power requirements, and four ARM Cortex-510 cores for efficiency. There is a slight variation in terms of the core frequencies, as can be seen in the table above, and thanks to higher core frequencies, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is expected to take the lead in CPU performance. However, higher core frequencies also put the chipset at the risk of overheating — which can lead to thermal throttling. On the other hand, Samsung appears to be taking the wise step of consciously limiting the clock speeds of the Exynos 2200 to avoid throttling-related issues, which have plagued the Exynos lineup of chips for several previous generations.
