Samsung's Galaxy S21 may be arriving by the end of next month. So it's not surprising that the leaks are starting to come fast and furious, with a steady stream of new information regarding its display, specs and price coming over the last month.
Now we are getting another glimpse at the kind of performance we might expect from the standard Galaxy S21, courtesy of a set of Geekbench 5 results. Unfortunately, things aren't looking that great for Samsung's flagship Android offering of 2021 right now (via BGR).
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The Geekbench 5 result for this standard Galaxy S21 came in at 1,075 for the single-core and 2,916 for the multi-core. For those keeping track at home, that would be a slight improvement on the single-core result from the Snapdragon 865+ powered Galaxy Note 20 Ultra (985, 3,294). However, it's a step back on multi-core result from the Snapdragon 865 results for the Galaxy S20 (3,147). But before Android fans panic, there are a few things to consider here that make this not such bad news.
The first is that even with little more than a month to go before the announcement of these phones, it's still too early to put too much weight behind benchmarks. There is no chance that the Snapdragon 888 will be behind its predecessor in any metric once it is properly optimized, so the only real question is whether that will happen ahead of launch.
The other good news is that the chipset is the newly announced Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor and not Samsung's own Exynos chip. While the latter is starting to show some competitive performance on pure speed, Qualcomm has some really interesting stuff going on in the Snapdragon 888 that could yield some considerable real-world gains beyond what would be captured by a Geekbench 5 result.
Now, none of this is going to allow the Galaxy S21 to catch up to, much less surpass, the iPhone 12 and its A14 Bionic chip from a performance standpoint, that was never in the cards. However, it seems reasonable to project that it will again close the gap to something similar, if not slightly closer, than the difference between Samsung and Apple's flagships last year.
