Alleged Exynos 1080 AnTuTu listing surfaces online; Samsung's newest SoC handily outperforms everything Qualcomm has to offer

Samsung slyly unveiled its new 'mid-range' Exynos 1080 SoC a few days ago. The 5nm beast was hyped up to perform on par with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. If its recent AnTuTu score is anything to go by, the said hype was well-deserved. The alleged listing effectively crowns the Exynos 1080 as the king of AnTuTu, as it is the highest-ever score posted by a smartphone.

The Exynos 1080's AnTuTu score comes via two Twitter leakers; Ice Universe and Digital Chat Station. With an overall score of 693,600, the silicon easily bests the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+. Those numbers are, in part, due to four high-performance ARM Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 3.0GHz. It is the first time we see ARM's new Cortex-A78 cores and the Mali G78 GPU in action. These results set high expectations for ARM's flagship Cortex-X1 Super Core, as OEMs will be able to push it way harder for even higher scores.

What makes things more exciting is that the test was likely run on a pre-production smartphone with unstable firmware. It'll be interesting to see how well the chip does on a retail version of said smartphone. Rumor has it that the Exynos 1080 will be exclusive to China for an unspecified period and make its debut alongside a Vivo device with a 120Hz screen.

It shouldn't be long before the Exynos 1080 hits other popular benchmarking software like Geekbench. It will give us better insights into its performance and enable direct comparison with chips like the Exynos 2100 and Snapdragon 875. As always, benchmark scores aren't entirely representative of a chip's performance. However, if Samsung plays its cards right, it could finally beat Qualcomm for the first time in years.