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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Although this is a vulnerability in Samsung Exynos chipsets, ironically most Samsung flagship phones sold in the US shouldn't be affected because they use Qualcomm chipsets there rather than their own. The variants sold in Europe and Asia tend to have Exynos chipsets though, with the exception of the S23 series which is Qualcomm everywhere.

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According to https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-inte..., this likely affects:

> Mobile devices from Samsung, including those in the S22, M33, M13, M12, A71, A53, A33, A21, A13, A12 and A04 series

...and many others.

Right but it depends where the device was sold. A Galaxy S22 intended for Europe is built with a vulnerable Exynos SOC but a Galaxy S22 built for the US has a Snapdragon.

Yes, and most of those are not sold in the US.

And you seem to be missing that of Samsung puts out Qualcomm and Exynos versions of the same phone, sharing a model number with a phone on that list doesn't preclude it from being unaffected

Most of the lower end/mid-range phones with Exynos chips have Exynos chips in the US too e.g. A53.

We got our A53's on Amazon, it shows on their product page it uses the Exynos chipset. There's also no option in the settings to disable VoLTE.

I just had a chat with Samsung support. They seem pretty clueless about the whole thing, and brushed off the disclosure on the semiconductor.samsung.com site as "not the official Samsung USA site".

There doesn't seem to be a user-friendly way to determine for sure which chipset you have. I think at the very least, Samsung ought to publish a little app for that immediately.

That's interesting. People here in Europe hate Exynos chipsets, they say they are worse than Qualcomm. Are they giving up on them finally?

The Exynos variants usually are worse than the Qualcomm ones, the cynical take was that most prominent phone reviewers are based in the US so giving that market the superior chipset served to bait-and-switch the other markets into buying inferior hardware. It remains to be seen if Exynos will return for the S24 or they'll stick with Qualcomm across the board.

> the cynical take was that most prominent phone reviewers are based in the US

I don't think that's true, most of the reviews I read and watch on YouTube are made in Europe, UK, India.

When I worked at Samsung the reason was two-fold:

- There's a lot of internal competition, having two SoC suppliers for your flagship phones gives you leverage against both Qualcomm and in-house teams.

- Samsung treads lightly with US carriers. Using Qualcomm modems makes their certification process and field testing easier.

Dunno, the real complaint against exynos in favour of Qualcomm other than tribalism is that a lot of stuff was developed for Qualcomm with Adreno and not whatever GPU Exynos spouted at the time (custom weird thing early on, then PowerVR, nowadays Adreno). In USA they used Qualcomm due to CDMA shenanigans mainly.

Oh, and stuff like qualcomm-specific hacks people were used to from Jail broken HTC devices (like phone call recording) not working. Final minority complaint was essentially based on qualcomm devices being more popular so you had more resources for custom roms, despite the fact that Exynos meant no need to do complicated jailbreak to load a custom rom.

Personally I found no issue with Exynos chips whatsoever. Always some of the fastest stuff I had in my hands.

Most benchmarks showed Exynos falling behind in both performance and power effeciency for years. I don't know if this is still the case with the latest models, but many Exynos phones were also plain worse than their Qualcom counterparts.

Quite sad, really, because the space can use some competition.

It is still the case. This team went deep into benchmarking mobile chipset power efficiency, Exynos does not do well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0ukXDnWlTY

That's very unfortunate. With their vertical integration, Samsung is one of the few companies that can actually compete with Apple if they can get the tech up to spec.

Can you source your claim that Exynos used weird GPUs? AFAIK, Exynos mostly used ARM Mali (the default for ARM chips) cores with the exception of the most recent iteration when they formed a partnership with AMD to use RDNA in the 2200 model. I am absolutely sure no Exynos chip ever used Adreno and I also think they never used PowerVR.

I mixed up Mali with Adreno, my fault.

As for weird GPUs, the S3C2410 (which got renamed as Exynos post-factum) used weird Samsung-designed GPU (doubly weird because it was GLES2-only GPU yet Samsung Android phones had GLES 1.1 only on it). Then first few generations (Galaxy S, S2, S3, S4) used PowerVR GPUs

The Exynos 5410 (for instance in the Galaxy S4) had a PowerVR GPU. Afaik that's the only one, Samsung was already using ARM Mali extensively then.

The Hummingbird (Galaxy S and iPhone 4) had one too but arguably it became part of the Exynos line-up after the fact.

Thank you for the correction. I did not know about those 2 examples.

I hope it goes the other way. My recollection is that the Exynos phones were able to be bootloader unlocked and flashed with other ROMs while the Qualcomm ones were locked down forever. I've stayed away from Samsung phones for that reason.

The latest S23 ditches the Exynos variant

Does that make it easier to get root on a US-based Samsung phone? Or US band compatible anyways?

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