In case you somehow missed it, Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 835 SoC features eight custom Kryo 280 cores in two clusters, working at 2.35GHz and 1.9GHz as well as Adreno 540 GPU. The Samsung Exynos 8895 chipset also uses a similar configuration with two clusters, four 2nd generation custom M1 Mongoose V2 cores, ticking at 2.3GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores, working at 1.7GHz. It also comes with a different Mali-G71 MP20 GPU.

It is important to note that both SoCs are made on a 10nm manufacturing process and come with Cat 16 GigabitLTE modem.

According to the results compiled by GSMArena.com, in Geekbench 3 multi-core benchmark, Samsung's Exynos 8895 is ahead of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 SoC, but only by a small margin. In the Geekbench 3 single-core benchmark results, the Snapdragon 835 SoC pulls ahead of Exynos 8895, most likely due to a higher CPU clock.

The situation is also similar in AnTuTu benchmarks, where Snapdragon 835 pulls ahead in AnTuTu 5 while Exynos 8895 takes the win in AnTuTu 6, but only by a small margin.

In the GFX 3.1 Manhattan benchmark, Exynos 8895 also pulls ahead in offscreen 1080p, and especially the onscreen test. A similar situation occurs in  the GFX 3.1 Car scene but the difference is quite smaller.

As you can see, the Exynos 8895 SoC manages to score a significantly higher score in Basemark X benchmark, pushing its way to the top of the list. The Basemark ES 3.1 / Metal benchmark also gives an edge to the Exynos 8895 SoC, but the results are usually so close together where both versions are pretty much next to each other so it appears that Samsung has made the right choice by including its own SoC in some versions.

It appears that users will not have to be cautious when buying the new Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S8+ as both the Snapdragon 835 and Exynos 8895 versions have pretty similar results, at least in benchmarks.