The Samsung Galaxy S10+ Snapdragon & Exynos Review: Almost Perfect, Yet So Flawed
by Andrei Frumusanu on March 29, 2019 9:00 AM ESTSPEC2006: Performance Parity At Different Efficiency
Having shed a bit of light on the new microarchitectural aspects of the memory subsystems of the new Snapdragon 855 and Exynos 9820, the question is now how the new chipsets perform in more significant macro workloads. For a continued reference CPU workload we’re again falling back to using SPEC.
The SPEC harness we’re using is compiled with simple and straightforward “-Ofast” compilation flag with the Android devices having an instruction tuning to Cortex-A53s as I’ve found this to give the highest average scores across a the wide range of SoCs.
It’s to be noted that SPEC2006 has been deprecated in favour of SPEC2017, however as the 2006 variant is well understood in terms of its workload characterisation for this article I’m still sticking the older version. We’ll be switching over to SPEC2017 later this spring/summer and covering any new data in a separate article.
In the SPECint2006 suite of integer workloads, both chipsets don’t showcase any big surprises in performance. The new Snapdragon 855 variant of the Galaxy S10+ confirms the performance figures we were able to measure on the QRD platform back in January with little to no deviation. The Snapdragon posted excellent performance improvements over the Snapdragon 845 of last year and ties in with the Kirin 980 as the fastest Android SoCs for this year.
The Exynos 9820’s performance figures are also relatively unsurprising for me as I had muted expectations. Here we do see some relatively healthy performance improvements considering that we’re talking about mostly IPC gains on the part of the new Cheetah cores, as the new chipset is a mere 30MHz faster than last year’s chip.
The biggest improvements are found in 429.mcf as well as 471.omnetpp where the new M4 cores perform respectively 32% and 27% better. Both these workloads are the most latency and memory sensitive workloads in the SPECint2006 suite, so given the new chip’s improved memory subsystem it’s no wonder that it’s here where we see the biggest performance jumps. Mcf is also one of the rare tests where the Exynos manages to beat the Cortex A76’s in the S855 and K980 by a more significant amount. Unfortunately for the rest of the workloads being tied is the best-case scenario as it loses out by a small amount in all other workloads.
One thing that I have to note is that it’s possible that big parts of the benchmark probably weren’t run at the peak 2.73GHz clocks of the new M4 cores. Samsung has now enabled a current limiter circuit on the CPU cores and will now more aggressively throttle down the frequency of the CPU in high-power workloads. This means that needy workloads will only see the peak frequencies in the range of 5-10 seconds before throttling down to frequencies of 2.3-2.5GHz. I didn’t have time to have a more thorough monitoring of what the chip is doing during SPEC so it’s something I’ll have to follow up on.
When it comes to power efficiency, the new Exynos 9820 does improve notably compared to last year’s Exynos 9810. It seems that the biggest power efficiency improvements happened on the most memory intensive workloads, in particular 462.libquantum’s 74% efficiency improvement all while improving performance is quite impressive.
Having said that, as I had theorized back based on Samsung’s own marketing numbers, the efficiency gains just aren’t enough to actually compete against the 7nm Cortex A76 cores in the new Snapdragon and Kirin chipsets as Samsung’s chip loses out in every workload.
In the C/C++ workloads of SPECfp2006 we see a similar picture as in the integer workloads. The Snapdragon 855 distinguishes itself here as being able to distance itself more from the Kirin 980 in a few workloads such as 447.dealII and 453.povray, all while maintaining almost equal excellent power efficiency.
The Exynos 9820 here has a hard time showcasing big performance improvements compared to its predecessor, but the one workload where we see a massive jump is 470.lbm, with an 84% jump in performance compared to the M3 cores of last year. This workload is particularly latency and bandwidth intensive so the new load/store unit arrangement of the M4 cores seem to favour it a lot.
In terms of power efficiency, what is interesting is that the new Exynos doesn’t lose as badly as in some of the integer workloads, although it still very much loses to the Snapdragon and Kirin.
Again to have a wider range of performance comparison across ARMv8 cores in mobile here’s a grand overview of the most relevant SoCs we’ve tested:
Finally it’s important to have a wider overview of the performance and efficiency of the current generation chipsets:
In the SPECint2006 geomean score, the Exynos 9820 slightly loses out in the to the Snapdragon 855. More importantly, it uses 47% more energy and power to achieve this same performance. In SPECfp2006 this efficiency difference drops to 21% - although the performance on the M4 cores is also 7% less.
What is most interesting about the new Snapdragon 855 and Exynos 9820 chips is that they have multiple CPU groups, so I went ahead and also measured performance and power of the middle Cortex A76 cores of the Qualcomm chipset against the Cortex A75 cores of the Samsung silicon.
Unexpectedly, the Snapdragon chipset’s “middle” cores beat the Exynos’ middle cores by a hefty amount. At 2.4GHz, the three middle cores of the Snapdragon actually aren’t weak by any means, and only fall behind the Prime core by 15-19% in performance, for an 18% frequency deficit. The Cortex A75 cores on the Exynos chip are 35% weaker than the middle cores of the Snapdragon. Here a more even comparison probably would have been the 1.92GHz middle A76 cores of the Kirin 980, however I wasn’t able to benchmark them separately on Huawei’s devices.
Energy efficiency of Samsung’s A75 cores are good – although it comes at a larger performance deficit, they’re in line with the energy consumption of the A76 cores in the competition.
In the quest to find an answer on how much the actual process node impacts power efficiency between the 7nm Snapdragon and 8nm Exynos, I also went ahead and ran SPEC on the Cortex A55 cores of both chipsets. After a gruelling 11.5 hours of runtime we finally see that the little cores only post a fraction of the performance of the big core siblings. What is actually quite embarrassing though is that the power efficiency is also quite atrocious for the given performance. Here other blocks of the SoC as well as other active components are using up power without actually providing enough performance to compensate for it. This is a case of the system running at a performance point below the crossover threshold where racing to idle would have made more sense for energy.
Apple’s small cores are just such an incredible contrast here: Even though the absolute power isn’t that much bigger than the Cortex A55 cores, the Tempest and Mistral cores are 2.5x faster than an A55, which also results in energy efficiency that is around 2x better.
Finally getting back to the reason why I measured the A55 cores: The Exynos 9820 here again loses out not only in performance but also in power efficiency. Even though the chip’s A55 cores are clocked in higher at 1.95GHz, it’s likely the lack of L2 caches is handicapping the CPUs in IPC, and thus falls behind the 1.78GHz Snapdragon A55’s. Power efficiency here is better on the Snapdragon SoC by 15-18%.
During last summer’s Hot Chips presentation of the M3 CPU core Samsung had remarked to me that the M4 would be the competing against the Cortex A76, and not the M3. While in terms of power efficiency there’s the matter of us not having a valid apples-to-apples process node comparison at hands, at least from a performance perspective it doesn’t look like the new M4 cores are all that impressive, as they just barely manage hold up against the A76 in the Snapdragon and Kirin. Samsung’s CPU just looks to still have too many rough edges and bottlenecks, and thus ends up performing far below of what we’d expect of a microarchitecture that fundamentally on paper is wider than Arm’s Cortex A76.
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Thraxen - Friday, March 29, 2019 - link
I’m in that customization category and also not technically naive so avoiding any security issues is, well, as natural as not falling for e-mail scams. Anyway, I’m typing this reply on my iPad Pro and like it quite a bit, but compared to my S10 it’s boring as hell. The phone just feels more exciting while the iPad feels... safe? Like it was jointly produced by Fisher Price or something.jaju123 - Sunday, March 31, 2019 - link
Lol, I have the same experience. The iPad pro 11 that I have is like a kids version of what a mobile OS should be. I can barely do anything on it, whereas android on my mate 20 pro feels like an OS for adults.Thraxen - Sunday, March 31, 2019 - link
Exactly. I love customizing my phone. I can add widgets (real ones, not that card BS on iOS), change the screen grid layout, change all the icons or just one, use live wall papers (real ones, not that handful of very limited ones on iOS), add automation with apps like Tasker, change the dialer/contacts/etc apps, change how notification functions, etc, etc, etc...If there’s something you don’t like how it works or looks on Android there’s a very good chance you can change it. On iOS everything is Apple’s way. And I get the logic there. Apple is big on having a very consistent user experience. But for someone like me it’s painfully boring. Everyone’s iOS devices look the same. So one hand it means you are immediately comfortable using any iOS devices, but on the other it’s like living in one of those neighborhoods where the boulder used the same floor plan for every house. It’s soul sucking boring.
Speedfriend - Friday, March 29, 2019 - link
I use a iPhone and Android daily, and despite benchmarks saying that my iPhone 7 is much faster than my pixel 2 XL, in reality it is slower, takes longer to log into new WiFi, kills apps in the background and takes far worse photos. Plus it is loaded with bloatware I can't even remove off the home screen and can't even rearrange the home screen with icons at the bottom.Wardrive86 - Friday, March 29, 2019 - link
This is absolutely true. My job always upgrades me to the latest Iphone and Ipad. After having multiple generations of Iphone, browser performance is not as good as benchmarks suggest. Personal and work are always on the same network either WiFi or Verizon.GekkePrutser - Saturday, March 30, 2019 - link
That's because Apple skimps so much on memory. They make great SoCs but their memory skimping hurts the overall experience by killing off apps in the background too much. Especially after one or two iOS updates it becomes really bad.Irish910 - Saturday, March 30, 2019 - link
That’s just a blatant lie. I used an iPhone 7 Plus for almost 2 years and the thing was hella fast. Using my XS Max I can barely see a speed difference under most circumstances. The only thing that might seem “faster” is the non animations of apps in android. iOS is much more fluid and smooth. But memory, chipset and software, the iPhone should be faster.arayoflight - Saturday, March 30, 2019 - link
That applies only to the US. The iPhones are much, much more expensive outside of US. In my country, the 128GB S10+ costs less than the base 64GB iPhone XR (yes, the XR). If you are going to get comparable, even the base XS max costs about 1.5x of the S10+, and comes with half the storage to boot.Not to mention that Apple phones don't work that well outside US as well. There are no ubiquitous Apple stores which fix your problems immediately, Apple maps doesn't work well, or siri with non-US accents. You can't disable or set defaults to google assistant or google maps or chrome as well, so good luck. Also, the rest of the world doesn't use imessage, but WhatsApp.
iPhones are a much worse deal outside of US, They have excellent performance and displays yes, but they aren't excellent value for the atrocious prices you pay.
cha0z_ - Tuesday, April 9, 2019 - link
This, when I got my (sadly exynos as EU) note 9 it was HALF the price of the XS max 256GB at my carrier both and with deal. I literally could take two note 9 instead of a single xs max 256GB. Even if we argue that the xs max is a better phone (tho in reality it has it's + and - compared to the note 9), is it two times the price better? Had the money to buy both, but tbh I like android generally more. Tho I must admit that the iphones are a lot a lot smoother... got iphone 6s too and it's smoother than the note 9 and that's not exactly making me happy. :Did4andrei - Saturday, March 30, 2019 - link
You keep saying Android's security problems like it's an axiom. You're just as safe with a high end Android device like you are with an iphone. Android does not have ads. Tracking can be disabled or enabled with as much ease as on ios.Stop spreading bullshit. You are tracked and monetized on ios via 3rd parties just like on Android. Ios gathers data about you just like Android.