Details of the Exynos 2200 revealed as Geekbench listing shows performance merely on par with the Snapdragon 888

A few days ago, information on what could be the Google Pixel 6's Tensor chip surfaced, giving a first look at Google's semi-custom SoC. This time out, the Exynos 2200 that will debut on the Galaxy S22 series next year has now reared its head in the form of a trip to Geekbench. 

The Geekbench listing for the Exynos 2200 makes for interesting reading, as it shows that CPU performance may not be as impressive as thought. The Exynos 2200 records a single-core score of 1073 and a multi-core score of 3389. Those are solid numbers, no doubt, but perhaps a bit disappointing. The OnePlus 9 Pro and its Snapdragon 888, for example, have been seen to record single and multi-core scores of 1105 and 3255 respectively. The Exynos 2200 doesn't seem to offer much better CPU performance than the Snapdragon 888.

Details of the chipset were also revealed on the Geekbench console. The Exynos 2200 appears to adopt a Cortex-X2 core as its super, peak-performance core. The X2 is an improvement on the X1 core on the Exynos 2100. That core is clocked at 2.59 GHz, a drop from the 2.91 GHz clock speed of the Exynos 2100's X1 core. The X2 core is joined by three cores clocked at 2.5 GHz and four cores clocked at 1.73 GHz. Both of those are lower frequencies than equivalent clusters on the Exynos 2100.

The Exynos 2200 is expected to offer a class-leading GPU, and the listing does confirm the chipset's onboard AMD mRDNA GPU. We've already seen early GPU benchmarks, and they look promising. There are two potential reasons for the low benchmark scores and clock speeds: either Samsung is actively trying to trade peak performance for improved sustained performance and efficiency, or the device was benchmarked while in a power-saving mode of sorts. The listed Governor, "energy_aware" hints that the latter may be the case. That, of course, raises the question: if performance is already this impressive in a power-saving mode, how powerful will the Exynos 2200 be when unfettered?

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