Samsung’s next flagship mobile processor, the unreleased Exynos 2700, has reportedly outperformed Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and its more powerful Pro variant across a range of internal performance tests. The figures were first reported by South Korean outlets Yonhap News Agency and Seoul Economic Daily, citing unnamed industry sources, before being amplified internationally by tipster Ice Universe and picked up by outlets including Android Authority.
What the tests reportedly show
According to the reports, Samsung’s Mobile eXperience (MX) division, the unit responsible for Galaxy smartphones, ran head-to-head benchmarks pitting the Exynos 2700 against Qualcomm’s unreleased chips. On the widely used Geekbench 6.5 multi-core test, the Exynos 2700 reportedly scored about 19% higher than the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and roughly 9.5% higher than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro.
The gap reportedly widens under constrained power conditions, a scenario relevant to everyday phone use rather than benchmark-chasing peak performance. At a 2.5-watt power limit meant to simulate typical usage, the Exynos 2700’s graphics processor reportedly held leads of about 24% over the standard Snapdragon chip and 22% over the Pro version. In artificial intelligence tests using Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B language model, the Exynos chip reportedly generated responses around 18% faster than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, while drawing about 161mA of current compared with roughly 185mA for Qualcomm’s chip, a reduction of about 12.7%.
The Exynos 2700 is expected to be built on Samsung Foundry’s second-generation 2-nanometer process, known as SF2P, a manufacturing node the company is racing to perfect against rivals such as TSMC. A separate Geekbench AI listing believed to correspond to the chip, under the codename S5E9975, showed a 10-core processor with a peak clock speed of roughly 4.24GHz.
Why the numbers deserve caution
Every outlet reporting these figures describes them as unverified, internal, pre-release results rather than independently confirmed public benchmarks.
Samsung has not published these results itself, and no independent testing lab has confirmed them. Manufacturers routinely run favourable internal comparisons of unfinished chips, and real-world performance can shift substantially before a device ships. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and its Pro variant, sometimes referred to as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, are themselves still unreleased, meaning both sides of the comparison remain works in progress.
The commercial stakes are significant. Samsung reportedly spent about 7.4 trillion won, roughly $5.4 billion, on external application processors in the first half of 2026 alone, with annual spending on such chips cited elsewhere at up to 14 trillion won. If the Exynos 2700’s performance and manufacturing yields hold up in mass production, Samsung could expand its use of in-house silicon in the 2026 Galaxy S27 series, including higher-end models that have historically relied on Qualcomm outside the United States and China.
That last point carries particular relevance for buyers across Europe and other international markets, where Samsung has long shipped Exynos-powered Galaxy variants alongside Snapdragon versions sold in the US. Exynos chips have at times lagged behind their Snapdragon counterparts in efficiency and sustained performance, a gap that has shaped how reviewers and consumers in those markets have judged otherwise identical phones. Whether this round of internal testing translates into a genuine improvement will not be clear until independent reviewers can test production units after launch.
This article is free to read. It always will be — no paywall, no account, no tracking.
