The Samsung Galaxy S20+, S20 Ultra Exynos & Snapdragon Review: Megalomania Devices
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 3, 2020 9:30 AM ESTBattery Life: Good (60Hz) to Average (120Hz)
Last week we had published our initial battery life report on the S20 series, with some interesting findings. First of all, what needs to be mentioned again is that the new 120Hz display modes on the phones come with a quite large battery life impact. The behavior is exhibited on all our S20 models at hand and I think it’s likely due to the panel itself or the DDIC. Samsung had included various display refresh modes varying from 48, 60, 96 and 120Hz, however we have yet to find evidence of any mechanism that actively switches between the various modes.
As such, even on a black static screen, running at 120Hz comes with a quite steep power penalty that’s always present whenever the display is on, costing around 160mW of power.
I had noted that I found our variant of the Snapdragon 865 Galaxy S20 Ultra to have worse idle power than our Exynos phone version. Initially I had attributed this to possibly the SoC or even the nature of the external X55 modem, but since then I’ve also received an LG V60 and that device’s idle power is perfectly normal. The only other thing that differentiates our S20 Ultra here is the fact that it has the extra mmWave antennas and RF systems. It would be interesting to see if non-mmWave variants of the Snapdragon S20 Ultra behave any differently (Tip at our Chinese or Korean readers).
I also had made mention that the “Performance” mode of the Exynos S20 phones seemingly behaved quite overzealously in terms of its scheduling settings, and there was a quite drastic increase in power draw for what was not nearly an as drastic increase in performance. I’ve rerun the battery tests in the “Optimized” settings which doesn’t have the “Increased system speed” option enabled, and I’ve confirmed my suspicion as the battery life figures did improve by some notable amounts. I’ve also tested the Snapdragon in the “Optimized” setting and the runtimes only differed by 2% - for users having the Snapdragon versions it’s thus safe to simply leave that enabled.
In our web test, the new S20 series end up right about where you’d expect them to. The Snapdragon 865 Galaxy S20 Ultra at 60Hz fares the best amongst the tested models, and now represents Samsung’s longest lasting flagship device. Slightly behind it we find the Exynos S20 Ultra at 60Hz. The difference between the two phones here isn’t very big in this test, and I attribute this to the higher constant idle power draw of the Snapdragon phone which counteracts the much higher compute efficiency of the SoC. The Eyxnos S20+ ends up slightly behind the S10+ phones, but still lasts a good 12.65h in this test.
Once we turn on the 120Hz display modes, the battery life results on all the phones drops quite notably. The Snapdragon S20 Ultra goes from 14h to 11.3h, a 20% drop. The same applies to the Exynos S20 Ultra, with a 20% drop, but for some reason the S20+ sees a larger drop of 25%. In the systems performance section I did mention that there’s some software configuration differences between the Exynos S20 Ultra and S20+, maybe some of that plays part here in the results.
Overall, the conclusion on battery life isn’t quite as black & white as we thought it would be. The key point is to stay away from the seemingly broken Performance mode on the Exynos chipset and you’ll have roughly similar battery life results between the two SoC variants of the S20. Naturally, that’s only being achieved by the fact that the Exynos does showcase worse performance, saving energy by using the more efficient lower performance states more.
What’s valid for all variants of the phones is that the 120Hz display mode is quite the power hog. Samsung probably has the opportunity to improve this by introducing a better managed variable refresh rate mode that actually changes between the different refresh rates based on content, something that seemingly isn’t happening right now. Also switching to lower refresh rates when showcasing static content would be a huge power saver, but I’m not sure if Samsung would be able to actually deploy such a mechanism.
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Reflex78 - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
I live in Europe, I like Samsung and have S9 at the moment.But I will never pay +1000€ for lower quality Exynos S20 version in Europe!
This is a big mistake from the company management to allow such a difference between this 2 variants at the same price!
And I just read that they have chosen to sell Snapdragon version even for their home country:
https://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-chip-divis...
twtech - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
The edge design of Samsung's more recent releases is just not good. There are no cases that can both properly protect the screen, and avoid blocking any of it. My older phones typically lasted for years without any significant damage. These new ones are one slip of the hand away from being garbage fodder.FunBunny2 - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
"These new ones are one slip of the hand away from being garbage fodder."rube!! :) it's a feature, not a bug. going back to Lotus/MS conflict: "DOS ain't done til 1-2-3 won't run."
Harysviewty - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Totally wrong calculation. It's 7.1mp when you crop 3x3. It's only possible to do full 12mp resolution with the help of Super resolution algorithm, which adds up to 75% more detail to 'normal bayer' setupAndrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
I don't know what you're talking about. The sensor is 108MP at 12000 x 9000. 3x3 binning results in 4000 x 3000, which is 12MP.krazyfrog - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
The 3x3 binning only happens on the 108MP sensor, not on the 64MP sensor.s.yu - Saturday, April 4, 2020 - link
You said "crop 3x3" which confuses people, usually we just say 3x crop, but yes, the digital zoom doesn't provide native 12MP in any sense at 3x.JDSP - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Image links on the iPhone are wrong, Wide links to zoom and night sight links to normalAndrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Corrected that, thanks. There's probably a few other link issues there I'll keep an eye out for that.Quantumz0d - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Great analysis, will go through it slowly but looking at that Exynos 990, Seriously WTF is that. Higher power consumption, lower GPU performance, higher throttling. Very unfortunate. And losing to that copycat Chinese Huawei Kirin trash (EMUI garbage with LZ Play backdoor, Read only EROFS Filesystem and Google copying that into Pixel 4 and the proprietary garbage NMSDslot no 3.5mm jack, No Play Store, lies and deception) Samsung should be ashamed of themselves removing all their genius whatever PR ads for milking customers and offering mediocrity.The only good part for Exynos is unlockable bootloader. Since SD versions in US are locked as hell and useless for customization esp how they depreciated the SpO2 sensor in this phone HW and from SW side also in S10 and previous phones to promote bullshit Smartwatches.
This phone sucks bad, their S10 has better features and looks better as well on top this phone camera sucks, no 3.5mm jack and ugliest design ever with insane price tag on top, LG's V60 is looking very good in comparison from Camera to Audio and other features/specs plus price vs this phone or even that Chinese OP8 Pro (despite lacking SD slot and 3.5mm jack as at-least it is cheaper and has hassle free Bootloader unlock), since Samsung dropping HW feature set which defines the all in one phones from Samsung they want greed and money from that shitty Buds and other garbage.
S10+ Exynos is a better choice all rounder as it has BL unlock as well. On top I'd like to mention how DJ Koh also was removed from the Samsung mobile CEO office, I presume it also played an important role in S.LSI even if independent and the financial results of the conglomerate, esp how it impacted the design philosophy for sure as Note 10 provided a platform for removing features and cost cutting similar aspect in S20 a bit more worse.
On the Foundry aspects, TSMC 7NP is not EUV and Samsung 7nm LPP is EUV since N7+ is the EUV one. Not sure 20% to 30% is valid ? I do not know since the uArch is garbage doesn't mean that the node is trash, esp last rumor was Ampere would be on Samsung node with EUV and Nvidia wouldn't afford a stupid decision tbh, and a big shame is S.LSI getting hacked. I think the PR marketing team and the budgets ruined them or such, we may never know. Shame indeed.