Samsung Galaxy S22 pops up on Geekbench

Leaks about the Samsung Galaxy S22 flagship have been flying left and right in the past couple of weeks, and in a typical modern-day-flagship-phone fashion, there won’t be any mysteries left when the actual announcement comes.

We already have the Galaxy S22 series model numbers, along with the 50MP GN5 ISOCELL camera sensor potentially found in the Galaxy S22 and S22+. Then there were some leaks regarding the battery capacity of the Galaxy S22 series, and now we have yet another sneaky bit of information about the actual performance of Samsung’s next flagship.

The Geekbench listing was dug up by 91mobiles and contains some valuable information. For starters, it shows a Snapdragon-equipped Galaxy S22 (model number SM-S901U), running the Snapdragon 895 chipset with an Adreno 730 GPU on board.

The Snapdragon 888 successor is codenamed Taro and is supposedly manufactured using a 4nm process. The guys at 91mobiles suggest that the U in the model number means that the unit is for the US market.

Looking at the Geekbench info we spot the 6.82GB RAM value, meaning that the Galaxy S22 will come equipped with 8GB of RAM. There’s a mention of the Android version - it’s unsurprisingly Android 12 out of the box.

Samsung Galaxy S22 Geekbench score

Now, looking at the test result itself it’s plain to see that we’re talking about the Snapdragon 895 (or the Snapdragon 898 it might be one and the same). The SoC features three clusters - one fast 3.00GHz core, 3 2.50GHz cores, and 4 efficient 1.79 core. Pretty much the standard configuration of the past few top Snapdragon platforms.

Another leak from XDA Developers suggests that the upcoming Snapdragon 898/895 processor will feature three CPU core designs in a 1 x 3 x 4 configuration - one Cortex-X2, three Cortex-A710, and four Cortex-A510 ARMv9 architectures. The Geekbench info pretty much confirms this.

For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S21 with its Snapdragon 888 managed to score 1043 in the single-core test and 3090 in the multi-core. There’s a huge difference in performance, not in the favor of the new chipset.

There are a few considerations here - first, this almost certainly is a pre-release unit, that needs to be further optimized and tweaked. Second - the Geekbench test might’ve been run in battery-saving mode, which drastically throttles the performance.

There was another Geekbench result of the Snapdragon 898/895 (of a Vivo phone with model number V2102A) circulating the online space, showing scores of 720 and 1919 in single and multi-core respectively, further complicating the matter.

Our take

This Geekbench result seems a bit fishy - it lists the ARMv8 architecture while the new Snapdragon should be based on the ARM v9 design announced earlier this year.

There are several potential scenarios. There’s the possibility that the Snapdragon 895 uses the old design, while the v9 has been delayed a couple of months down the line and will show its face in the “plus” version of the SoC.

On the other hand, Geekbench might not recognize the new v9 architecture without a software update and just list the unknown entity as a v8. Whatever the case is, we’re pretty sure about the Adreno 730 GPU. The Samsung Galaxy S22 series is expected to be officially announced in the first quarter of 2022 (probably in the February-March window). We expect the price spread to vary between the $800 and $900 for the regular Galaxy S22, $1000-$1,100 for the Galaxy S22+, and finally, $1,200-$1,400 for the Galaxy S22 Ultra.