Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus may not be as powerful as hoped

Samsung Galaxy S21 Plus
The Samsung Galaxy S21 Plus (Image credit: Future)

We’ve been hearing lots of positive things about the Exynos 2200 chipset destined for the Samsung Galaxy S22 range in some parts of the world, but a new benchmark suggests that it might not be so powerful after all.

A Geekbench listing for a phone with a model number linked to the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus has been spotted by Twitter leaker FrontTron, and it includes an Exynos 2200 chipset, 8GB of RAM, and Android 12.

That chipset has one high-power core clocked at 2.59GHz, three cores clocked at 2.50GHz, and four low-power cores clocked at 1.73GHz, but perhaps the numbers you’re more interested in are the benchmark scores, and these don’t impress.

A benchmark listing for the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus

(Image credit: Geekbench)

The Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus is shown to achieve a single-core score of 1,073, and a multi-core result of 3,389. For reference, in our own tests the Samsung Galaxy S21 achieved a multi-core score of 3,367, while the Samsung Galaxy S21 Plus managed a multi-core result of 3,170 and a single-core result of 1,035.

So in other words the scores shown here are only a tiny upgrade on the current models, and we were testing the Exynos versions of the Galaxy S21 range, so this Galaxy S22 Plus should be using a newer and better version of the same chipset range.


A Samsung Galaxy S21 Plus from the back in someone's hand

We'd expect the S22 Plus will be a lot more powerful than the S21 Plus (Image credit: Future)

Analysis: don’t read too much into these scores

So what’s going on? For one thing we’d throw in our usual caveat here – this listing could be fake, and even if it is real it will be based on pre-release hardware and software, so the final scores are likely to be higher.

But there’s likely another factor here too – the benchmark refers to ‘energy aware’, which might suggest the use of a power-saving mode when this benchmark was taken. In other words, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus might only have been using a fraction of its full power.

We’re not sure why the benchmark would have been recorded in such a mode, as that’s rare to see, but it would certainly explain the scores. So while we can’t be certain what’s going on, it’s very likely that the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus will be a much better performer than this benchmark suggests.

Via SamMobile

James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.

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