Benchmark Leak Reveals How Fast the Samsung Galaxy Watch 9 Really Is

The Galaxy Watch 9 is set to debut on Wednesday, July 22, alongside the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2. Rumours have long hinted at a major hardware upgrade, and a fresh benchmark leak finally puts numbers to the hype.

At the heart of the new device is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite. On paper it looks a lot like the older Exynos W1000 – both sport an ARM Cortex‑A78 performance core and a quartet of Cortex‑A55 efficiency cores – but the clock speeds have been nudged up considerably. The A78 now tops out at 2.1 GHz, while the A55s run at 1.95 GHz, a noticeable jump from the 1.6 GHz/1.5 GHz pair in the Exynos.

Geekbench 5 tells the story in raw numbers. In single‑core tests the Wear Elite scores 5,731 points, and in multi‑core it reaches 5,459 – roughly 56 % faster on the CPU side than the Exynos W1000’s 3,716 and 3,993 scores. The GPU side isn’t left behind either: OpenCL results show a 47 % uplift, thanks to a graphics engine Qualcomm claims is seven times faster than the previous Snapdragon W5 Gen 2.

Qualcomm also touts an integrated Hexagon AI accelerator and a fast‑charge capability that can juice the watch from 0 % to 50 % in about ten minutes. Those are nice conveniences, but the headline numbers make it clear the Watch 9 will feel snappier than its predecessors, especially when scrolling through apps or loading watch faces.

That said, we should keep our expectations in check. Even with the impressive gains, a smartwatch’s silicon can’t compete with modern smartphones. For instance, the budget Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 from 2023 still outpaces the Wear Elite in multi‑threaded workloads by almost double.

All in all, the leak paints a promising picture: a faster CPU, a much stronger GPU, and a few quality‑of‑life upgrades that should make the Galaxy Watch 9 feel like a genuine step forward in Samsung’s wearable lineup.