Something to look forward to: The fact that Apple'south A14 Bionic only brought modest operation improvements over the A13 has led some to believe the smartphone spec war is over. Nevertheless, Samsung's partnership with AMD may before long bring a mobile chipset that challenges the mobile performance crown for the first time in years.

When Samsung announced the Exynos 2100 mobile platform, it outlined a number of improvements that make it competitive with the new and pop SoC in town -- the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. However, that's because with the new Exynos chip and the Snapdragon 888 bear some similarities in terms of the CPU design, and the South Korean giant has been under pregnant public pressure to come up with a better chipset of its ain or drib the idea altogether from future flagship phones.

Early on benchmarks performed using Samsung'southward new Galaxy S21 Ultra testify that at that place'south still a gap in performance between the 2 fries and that it by and large comes downwardly to the different GPUs, with the Adreno 660 (Snapdragon) showing a 28% lead over the Mali-G78 MP14 (Exynos), admitting at the cost of running hotter. On the other mitt, the Exynos 2100 is quite comparable on the CPU forepart, every bit information technology even manages to beat the Snapdragon by a pocket-sized 4% margin in some tests thanks to slightly higher clocks.

That could mean that given plenty effort and resources, Samsung could perfect its design to become competitive even with Apple'due south A-serial SoCs. And since that hinges on integrating a more than powerful GPU, that'due south where its partnership with AMD would become crucial.

The two companies accept been silently working on an RDNA-based GPU for smartphones since 2022, and the piffling criterion data that cruel through the cracks in 2022 showed promising results against Adreno designs at the time.

Co-ordinate to a new leak, Samsung is getting close to releasing an Exynos chip equipped with an RDNA-based GPU, possibly before the end of this year. This is in line with what Samsung had already disclosed on its evolution schedule, but the more interesting office is that someone was obviously able to benchmark an engineering sample of the upcoming SoC.

This person merely performed GPU-specific benchmarks and the results announced to exist impressive. When compared to Apple'due south A14 Bionic, the RDNA SoC almost doubles the GPU performance in the GFXBench Aztec Normal and High Schoolhouse tests. Furthermore, the A14 Bionic manages 120 fps in the GFXBench Manhattan 3.1 test, while the unnamed Exynos SoC achieves around 181 frames per second.

Take these results with the customary grain of salt, just this could mean that future premium Milky way smartphones will pack some serious GPU functioning that volition be competitive with Apple'due south next-gen A15 that is said to ability the iPhone 12S lineup. Otherwise, the biggest question mark pertains to the chip'due south performance per watt, which could be worse on the Exynos scrap. If Samsung and AMD can solve that equation, it could give Qualcomm a run for its money, while MediaTek will run for embrace.