For those of us interested in comparing mobile chips, Samsung is producing the Galaxy S9 with both the Exynos 9810 and Snapdragon 845 SoC’s which is the latest and greatest from Samsung and Qualcomm respectively.
To make the odds more even, both chipsets are manufactured on the Samsung 10nm LPP process so this is gonna make for a good battle.
Without further ado let’s get to the specs and benchmarks courtesy of Anandtech.
Let’s begin with single core integer and floating point performance in Geekbench
The Exynos is a heavy hitter out of the gate, so this is gonna be an easy battle right?
Let’s move on to PCMark Work 2.0 which is a great tool for measuring various workloads and is usually representative of application performance.
Ouch! The Exynos is getting creamed. How can this be?
Let’s move on to the web browsing benchmarks, an important metric for a mobile device. Maybe the Exynos will excel here.
Nope, the Snapdragon still reigns supreme. How can this be with the large and powerful M3 cores in the Exynos?
A word from Andrei Frumusanu of Anandtech:
As to why this is happening on the Exynos is something that I attribute to scheduler and DVFS. Samsung’s new scheduler and DVFS just seems absolutely atrociously tuned for performance. I tested an interactive workload on both Snapdragon and Exynos devices and the contrast couldn’t be any greater. On the Snapdragon 845 Galaxy S9 a steady state workload thread will seemingly migrate from a full idle state of the little CPUs onto the big CPUs after 65ms. At the migration moment the big CPUs kick into full gear at 2803MHz and will maintain that frequency for as long as the workload demands it.
On the Exynos 9810 Galaxy S9 the same workload will also migrate around at the 60ms time from the little cores up to the big cores, however once on the big cores the thread starts at the lowest frequencies of the big cluster – 650-741MHz. It takes the workload a whole 370ms until it reaches the 2314MHz state of the M3 cores – which according to the SPEC benchmarks is around the maximum single-threaded performance of the Snapdragon 845’s performance cores. To reach the full 2703MHz of the M3 cores the workload needs to have been active for a staggering 410ms before the DVFS mechanism starts switching to that frequency state.
UI workloads are highly transactional and very rarely is there something which takes longer than a few frames. The fact that the Exynos 9810 takes over 5x longer to reach the maximum performance state of the Snapdragon 845 basically invalidates absolutely everything about the performance of its cores. For workloads which are shorter than 400ms (which is a lot of time in computing terms) the Snapdragon will have already finished the race before the Exynos warms up. Only at higher workload durations would the Exynos then finally catch up. Acceleration vs maximum speed being the key aspects here.
Alrighty then, looks like Samsung Semiconductor is having some troubles in the way they tuned the Exynos, simply having fast cores isn’t enough for race-to-sleep workloads.
Let’s move on to some GPU benchmarks and hope the Exynos fares better there.
These results are more in line with the specs of different GPUs. Another solid win for the Snapdragon.
Finally a quick look at the battery life.
This is the most worrisome result for people looking to buy the Exynos version of the Galaxy S9. Even with power saving mode enabled the Snapdragon has better battery life. It is unclear why it’s showing such a poor result, but it seems to be high powerdraw from the M3 cores.
Final verdict;
The Champion by unanimous decision
The Snapdragon version is available in the US, China and Japan, while most other countries get the Exynos variant.