Samsung Galaxy Note9 Performance & Battery Showdown: Snapdragon vs Exynos
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 26, 2018 8:00 AM ESTConclusion - More of the same
While we never reviewed the Note9, and this piece isn’t meant to be a full review, we can still put out a few sentences about the phone as a whole. Here Samsung is able to build a fantastic device, and there’s very little to criticize the Note9 on. The screen is large, bright, sharp and accurate. The camera is leading edge, even though by now there are devices out in the market which manage to compete quite well with Samsung’s best, especially in low light. Samsung makes no compromises in features, and the Note9 has everything: a 3.5mm headphone jack, wireless charging, IP68 rating, and naturally its key feature, the S-Pen.
While on the outside, the Note9 impresses in all aspects regardless where you purchase it from, on the inside things are again quite different as we again see the usage of two very contrasting SoCs.
I think the following picture sums things up quite well:
Like on the Galaxy S9, the Note9’s Exynos variant is just an overall inferior device. Battery life was one aspect that the Exynos S9s fared quite terribly in, and this time around Samsung did manage to somewhat improve the difference to the Snapdragon 845. Unfortunately it’s not enough as the Snapdragon variant still leads.
While the battery disadvantage has somewhat decreased, Samsung has done nothing to improve the performance of the chipset. Here the Snapdragon 845’s software is still leagues ahead of what the Exynos is able to offer, with the latter still not being able to differentiate itself much from the Exynos 8895 in system performance. The benchmark differences are very much also representative of the real-world performance difference of both variants.
In our recent quarterly smartphone guide, I’ve recommended the Snapdragon Note9 alongside the S9s as among the best Android devices you can buy this holiday. The Exynos Note9 in my opinion again doesn’t really make the cut as you’re paying flagship prices for a device that offers less battery life and performance not much better than last year’s phones.
Having finally gotten these results out, I hope to finally turn the page on the topic, as I’m feeling like a broken record and the coverage is akin keeping on beating a dead horse. The situation is eerily similar to the Galaxy S4 SoC situation from a few years back, only that I feel the differences this year were much worse. Huawei’s vertical integration here is pushing the company to make great strides with every generation, and Apple’s silicon is now so well ahead that we’re not really expecting Android vendors to catch up any time soon.
Samsung as a whole needs to decide where they want to go forward with this dual-sourcing strategy as I currently see it as a lose-lose situation for both the smartphone division as well as their chipset business. Hopefully the Exynos 9820 manages to be competitive chipset and S.LSI manages to finally get serious about execution as a SoC vendor, as otherwise the next few years are just going to a rough ride.
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cha0z_ - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Excellent work and article.One question tho, why the exynos note 9 fail so bad in the GPU sustain performance? The sd845 note 9 shows great gains over the sd845 s9+ variant, why the exynos note doesn't have any gains over the exynos s9? I was expecting that both note phones will have similar benefits over the s9 respectable variants due to the better cooling?
kukuhp - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Great article Andrei, why not testing the standby drain?In my country, only available Exynos version of samsung flagship.
And i always notice exynos samsung consume more power in standby.
For example, In the same year-cpu-flagship between exynos and snapdragon, exynos will counsume at least 1% per hour in the night while i sleep, and the snapdragon about 0.3% per hour. And it will be worse in the work hour, exynos need charged in the middle of the day
cha0z_ - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
I am getting ~3% in 8-9h sleep on my exynos note 9. Not bad at all.128bit - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
I’m using S9 plus Exyons 9810 and one plus 6 snapdragon 845, 8 gig of ram, 128GB of storage for couple of month now and noticed that snapdragon 845 good in gaming, but still has some overheating issue in heavy use, battrey life of plus still same as S9 plus Exyons, touch latency of one plus 6 in general not as good as S9 plus Exyons and noticed all snapdragon phones has some issue with touch latency including pixel 2xl.zamroni - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
Conclusion: samsung should give up exynosgregoryzeng - Sunday, December 16, 2018 - link
Power consumption figures are easy, if you use the same hardware & software test tools on each tested smartphone.First charge to battery to 100 %. Then run tests via the input power source: external hardware cable, which will give accurate power use figures.
Second, use power-use software. These vary imo by brands, versions & models, so are not reliable.
I've used many in-line USB power devices; many brands, models, types, colors, etc. Only the test-laboratory-calibrated units, checked & used by professionals, will give true results.
cha0z_ - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
The test should be redone on android pie (or atleast stated it's no longer valid). Massive scores bumps on everything regarding the exynos version atleast. pcmark is from 5200 to 6000 points overall, small bumps on the web and video category and massive bumps in the other 3 (writing, photo, data). GPU is seeing notable performance gains in every test too (guess it's mostly new drivers related) - 3dmark, antutu gpu, renderscript and so on (eager to test in real world, but if approximation is correct, I would guess around 10-14% increase depending on the workload and that's not bad at all given the poor state exynos 9810/mali g72 mp18 sits).Not sure how the snapdragon version is doing on android 9 tho, maybe it's also up (but I doubt it will be or atleast by that much as it was really optimised on oreo already).
cha0z_ - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Correcting myself, web score is 6157 - a lot higher vs the android 8. :)Sad that this article was published before android 9 release. Not that it really matters+sd845 will always be the better SOC no matter what, but I am curious about the changes and to see scientific data about the current tuning as the exynos 9810 is closer to the sd845 in performance, but I think the battery took a hit even is slight.
Also the GPU is seeing 15% more fps in tests like gfx high/mid aztec, manhatan is up too, 3dmark too, antutu gpu too, everything. Really curious about the sustain performance and if it's closer to the sd this time as I feel it allows slightly higher heat. Oh, well... I understand this will never happens as it takes a lot of time and the topic is kinda old + getting absolute with new generation of phones around the corner.
The_Quantum_Guy - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link
Hey Andrei, I was looking forward to buy a Note 9. So according to you is it worth it to get an imported version from U.S. to India ???