Samsung to unveil its flagship Exynos 2100 chipset on January 12

Before the Samsung Galaxy S21 series' grand reveal on January 15, Samsung has something else in store for us: its Exynos 2100 flagship SoC. Thanks to a slew of leaks that started pouring in since as early as September 2020, we have a decent idea about how it will fare against the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. All of those speculations surrounding the chipset will be put to rest on the Exynos 2100's January 12 release date.

We already know that the Exynos 2100 performs on par with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888, at least in synthetic benchmarks. Its real-world performance should be revealed shortly to us once the Galaxy S21 series is out and about. While we have a rough idea about the Exynos 2100's CPU core configuration (1x Cortex-X1 + 3x Cortex-A78 + 4x Cortex-A55), several aspects of the silicon are still shrouded in mystery.

Things are about to get exciting on the GPU front too, as the Exynos 2100's proposed ARM Mali-G78 MP24 GPU managed to trade blows with the Adreno 660. However, Samsung could end up disabling some of the 24 cores, as the Mali-G78 MP24 was found to be a massive power hog when tested alongside the Huawei Mate 40's Kirin 9000 SoC.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 bought forth a laundry list of improvements to its ISP (image signal processor) and NPU (neural processing unit). We can expect to see some of those improvements on the Exynos 2100 as well, although support for proprietary Qualcomm technologies such as aptX will still be lacking.