We confirmed multiple times in the recent months that Samsung will release at least two variants of the Galaxy S7. One variant will feature the company's own Exynos 8890 chipset, while the other variant will come equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 SoC. The benchmark scores of the Exynos variant were leaked multiple times recently. Now, the benchmark scores of the Galaxy S7 with Snapdragon 820 have surfaced on the Internet, which shows that both variants have similar performance.
A post found on Weibo by a Chinese tipster supports that fact that a variant of the Galaxy S7 will indeed come with the Snapdragon 820, and that its performance was tested using Geekbench's benchmarking suite. According to the post, the device scored 2,456 points in the single-core performance test, while the multi-core test score was 5,423 points, which points towards impressive performance. The Snapdragon 820 uses four Kryo CPU cores with two cores clocked at 2.2GHz and the remaining cores clocked at 1.6-1.7GHz.
| Geekbench (Single-Core) | Geekbench (Multi-Core) | |
| Samsung Galaxy S7 (Snapdragon 820) | 2,456 | 5,423 |
| Samsung Galaxy S7 (Exynos 8890) | 2,294 | 6,908 |
| Apple iPhone 6s Plus (Apple A9) | 2,495 | 4,351 |
| Apple iPad Pro (Apple A9X) | 3,222 | 5,468 |
Instead of using ARM's stock CPU designs, Samsung and Qualcomm have used their own custom CPU cores in these chipsets. Samsung recently announced the Exynos 8890 with M1 cores and Mali-T880MP12 GPU. If this information is legit, buyers of the Galaxy S7 in the US, China, and some other markets, where Samsung will release the Snapdragon 820 variant, need not worry about the phone's performance. The Galaxy S7 will reportedly use a specialised variant of the Snapdragon 820 with thermal heat pipes.
