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Comment by nicolas_t | Hacker News Reader

The exynos vs snapdragon issue is a long standing issue with Samsung. There's also very significant differences between the flagship phones like the S22 ultra sold in EU (exynos) and the ones sold in the US or Asia (snapdragon)

Getting an Exynos galaxy means more thermal throttling, lower performances and is just not competitive with other brands for the budget.

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In case anyone else is wondering what causes the different models for different markets

>First, Qualcomm can't produce enough processor to fit in all of the Samsung's phones. Second, snapdragon is too expensive, especially if you buy it in other countries. So, Samsung only uses snapdragon in countries where Qualcomm sells them cheaper.

As well as wanting to be exposed into more markets

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Samsung-use-Exynos

I remember with my S9, even though the Exynos was slower, that's the device everyone wanted because the bootloader could be unlocked.

The snapdragon devices in Asia can be unlocked, only the US snapdragons cannot. I have mine unlocked and rooted (even if losing managed work profiles is a huge pain)

I thought both samsung and qualcomm dropped their custom cores for exynos and snapdragon at this point. So is there still such a huge difference between the two? Aren't both of them using the best arm licensed core? I get that for some reason apple sillicon like performance won't happen but this is just sad from samsung.

Also samsung seems to be doing something fishy with benchmark results. It seems like exynos has been very close or even outperforming snapdragon for years now in benchmarks but the performance gap in real life is still massive. My friend imported a samsung s21 and it is a nightmare compared to my snapdragon s21.

there are still many potential points of differentiation on each SoC. For flagships, the cores are pretty much identical, but the cache sizes, fabric, process, GPUs, etc. can change.

For the SoCs being compared here, the new Exynos model has half the big cores of the Qualcomm model.

It might be benchmark cherrypicking. Companies like AMD, Intel, even Apple pick the best looking data to make their silicon look much better than the competitor. The latest example was apple claiming its integrated gpu in its new apple silicon chip used in the Mac Studio was more powerful than nvidias 3090… that didnt turn out to be the case needless to say

Snapdragon 888 vs Exynos 2100 is great comparison because they use same process and almost same Cortex core. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exyno...

I wish I could read this review in 8 Gen1 vs 2200, but the writer took apart from Anandtech.

Yes, and moreso in some applications than others. For example, Exynos graphics drivers are utter garbage and on unconventional graphics tasks like console emulation Exynos chips perform like a Snapdragon that's five or more years out of date.

It also alternates between versions. Sometimes Exynos is better, and sometimes Snapdragon is. Somehow, this also has a massive impact on picture quality.

This nonsense made me go out of my way to buy a Pixel 5 (in 2022) instead of an S22. Those are the only two reasonably-sized phones I could find.

Why would Samsung own flagship chip perform worse than qualcoms? Wouldn't it be in Samsung's interest to either use an inferior version of the snapdragon or throttle it?

They still need a competitive offering against other Android manufacturers at the high end.

Xiaomi and others are happy to buy Qualcomm chips if it gives them the high end advantage

I don't understand, in the US Samsung uses Qualcomm but it is the US where a lot of these Chinese phones are not available yet in Europe where I can buy a Huawei phone Samsung uses Exynos.

To be honest, I also do not get Samsung's strategy. None of my tech literate friends in europe would buy Samsung because of this. I really wonder how much it impacts their sales.

This is because of old contracts and agreements, including patent agreements for LTE modem etc

For now, at least. I imagine they'll have caught up before too many generations. Samsung clearly has the resources to keep up.

Samsung has been promising that for almost 8 years now. For some reason they absolutely cannot figure out how to design a proper high end SoC. I'm not familiar with the design of exynos chips but I don't understand how they barely do better than Mediatek. They have control over the entire design of their devices and should have performances that is closer to Apple than it is to low/mid-end off the shelf designs.

Based on what I've read it seems to me that the gap has become worth over the years... The last time I remember reading that the exynos was competitive was around the Galaxy S6 so 2015

The S6 was clearly much better Exynos than Snapdragon. They were competitive for a few years more after.

That was because the s6 exynos was to first mobile cpu with 14nm and the equivalent snapdragon (810) was a particularly bad SoC. To the point where it was outperformed by previous gen snapdragons. So yes Exynos was competitive then, but mostly because the competition had an exceptionally bad year.

is it legal to sell products with different quality under same brand ? I mean if I consider myself mislead, do I have a case ?

Happens all the time with monitors and dual sourcing of parts like panels where it is lottery on who has supplied. With the s22 the 'intl' and 'us' models have different model numbers. I'm more concerned when buying a car and trying to figure out in which country it has been assembled (quality and parts used can differ)

In the same market, maybe, but Samsung has U.S. versions of their products as do many other brands.

Exynos has had at least one implementation which was significantly better than the contemporary Qualcomm SoC. (The Galaxy S6’s 7420).

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