Samsung built its own watch chips for eight years, and it just handed its flagship watch to Qualcomm instead. A leaked benchmark for the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2's Snapdragon Wear Elite chip shows why, with numbers landing more than 50% ahead of the Exynos chip Samsung has used in every Galaxy Watch since 2018.
The chip showed up in the Geekbench database with 573 in single-core and 1,069 in multi-core, both well past the Exynos W1000 in the current Ultra, the Watch 8, and the Watch 7. It runs five cores, one fast core at 2.11GHz and four power-saving cores at 1.96GHz, tested with 4GB of RAM on Android 16. It also has a dedicated AI chip that runs features like smart replies and fitness coaching right on the watch instead of leaning on your phone or the cloud.
The Snapdragon chip is only in the Ultra 2 while the cheaper Galaxy Watch 9 keeps the same Exynos it's had for three straight generations.
Samsung is far from the only company landing on Qualcomm. Snap spent a decade and billions building its own displays and silicon, yet its new $2,195 Specs still run two Snapdragon chips. Meta's Quest, Samsung's own Galaxy XR headset, Xreal's Project Aura glasses, and Google's Android XR devices all lean on Qualcomm too, and Qualcomm now sells a turnkey kit that lets any eyewear brand ship smart glasses on its silicon without building the hard parts. Its CEO says the company is working on more than 40 AI wearable designs. For a flagship wearable in 2026, Snapdragon has become the go-to answer, even for companies that would rather build the whole thing themselves.
These are early benchmark listings -- not final numbers -- and both chips are built the same way on a 3nm process with one fast core and four slower ones, so the day-to-day difference could turn out smaller than the scores suggest. The bigger win may end up being the on-device AI the new chip allows, which is right where Samsung, and the industry at large, has been pushing its watches.
Samsung is expected to launch the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 at its July 22 Unpacked event in London, with the watch reportedly going on sale August 5.