Organisation Performance

As with previous Samsung Galaxy S devices, there are two variants of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+. One version sold in the U.s., Communist china and Japan is powered by Qualcomm's latest system-on-a-chip, the Snapdragon 845. The other variant sold in the rest of the world uses Samsung's ain Exynos 9810, and that's the variant we reviewed.

The Exynos 9810 is the successor to the Exynos 8895 that first appeared in the Galaxy S8. We're still looking at a dual quad-cadre implementation, simply with newer core architectures, improved clock speeds and more enshroud. The 'big' operation cores are using the Exynos M3 design, which is a much wider cadre blueprint with significant IPC improvements over the Exynos M2 in the 8895. In that location are four of these cores clocked up to two.7 GHz in unmarried-core workloads, while sitting at 2.3 GHz in dual-core loads and 1.viii GHz in all-core workloads. This tiered clock-speed setup is very reminiscent of x86 chips from Intel and AMD, but is relatively rare in ARM SoCs. Complementing the big cores are four smaller efficiency cores that use the Cortex-A55 blueprint, clocked upward to 1.8 GHz. This is a modest upgrade on the Cortex-A53s used in the 8895, forth with a 100 MHz clock speed increment.

On the GPU side, Samsung has moved from a Mali-G71 MP20 at 546 MHz to a Republic of mali-G72 MP18 at 572 MHz. In other words, we're seeing two fewer cores than in the 8895, only at a higher clock and using a newer design. The memory controller remains the aforementioned quad sixteen-bit LPDDR4X controller providing 28.7 GB/s of bandwidth.

Equally the Exynos 9810 is an SoC, at that place's an integrated Shannon LTE modem with improved capabilities relative to the 8895. Samsung has upgraded the design to support Category 18 LTE with 6x carrier aggregation, with download speeds as high every bit 1200 Mbps. The SoC is manufactured on Samsung'southward 10nm LPP process.

Whenever you see a new SoC used in a smartphone that iterates on its powerful predecessor, you lot typically expect amend functioning. However with the Exynos 9810 in the Samsung Galaxy S9+, that's not really the instance, as we'll explore in both constructed and real-world benchmarks. Yes, that'southward right, nosotros're now using real-world performance benchmarks to measure smartphone performance.

Permit's boot things off looking at browser performance in Octane and Kraken. Hither nosotros see a decent performance improvement of around 25 pct for the Galaxy S9+ in Octane relative to the Galaxy S8+, however it falls behind in Kraken to the tune of 17 percent. Non the best outset for an SoC that supposedly has a more than than fifty% IPC gain.

In Basemark Web 3.0 the Galaxy S9+ is a decent 19 percent faster than the Milky way S8+ with the largest gains seen in the generic suite. However performance is no better than a device with the last-gen Snapdragon 835 inside, which is a concern for a newer SoC that is existence shipped alongside the Snapdragon 845 variant.

In PCMark we encounter relatively modest functioning gains. Using the original Work test, the Exynos 9810 in the Milky way S9+ is just four% faster than the Exynos 8895 looking at the overall score, which breaks down into 16% faster in the web test, 22% faster in the video test, 18% slower in the writing test, and 3% faster in the photo examination. In this benchmark, the Galaxy S9+ gets badly beaten past the Pixel 2 40 with its last-generation Snapdragon 835 SoC.

Looking at the newer Work 2.0 test, it'south however not neat news for the Milky way S9+ with but a 6 per centum performance proceeds. Once again, it gets handily beaten past the Snapdragon 835 past around 25 percent.

In Basemark Bone Ii ii.0, the Milky way S8+ actually outperforms the Galaxy S9+ by 14% in the overall score, though the Exynos 9810 does eek out a win in the CPU-heavy organization score to the tune of 20 per centum. Over again, non a great outcome for the newer Galaxy S9+ and its Exynos 9810 SoC, particularly considering it's browbeaten by the Snapdragon 835 once more.

As these are just constructed results, I did want to examine whether we're seeing any performance gains with the Exynos 9810+ in real earth applications. So I went back and re-tested a drove of smartphones in a range of widely used Play Store apps. Unfortunately I don't have data for the Exynos 8895 in these apps, only I tin compare the Exynos 9810 to the Snapdragon 835.

Pixlr is a pop photo editing app, and here I'chiliad benchmarking the fourth dimension it takes to save a large paradigm with a filter applied. The outcome is practical at full resolution during the save process, so a faster SoC tin apply the effect more apace and complete the save faster. In this exam, the Exynos 9810 is a decent 20 percent faster than the Snapdragon 835 in the Pixel ii XL.

Our Excel benchmark is a very basic column sort of a large file with 60,000+ rows. The Galaxy S9+ is 13 percent faster at completing this sort than the Pixel 2 Forty, though the HTC U11 using the same SoC closes this gap to just 7 percent. Non a resounding win for the Exynos 9810 merely better than nil.

When fully loading a PDF in Acrobat Reader, the Galaxy S9+ with the Exynos 9810 is over again around 20 pct faster than the Pixel two XL with its Snapdragon 835. A decent operation improvement merely information technology doesn't plant the Exynos chip as the outright fastest on the market, with the concluding-gen Kirin 960 coming in very close.

The terminal benchmark we'll be unveiling today is RAR decompression. Here the Exynos 9810 was actually eighteen percent slower than the Snapdragon 835 in the Pixel 2 40. A disappointing result for the Exynos 9810.