Hacker News Reader

Comment by satiric | Hacker News Reader

This site has a list of phones with the same CPU as the Samsung Galaxy S20 they mentioned. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_800/865

I wonder if it happens to them too?

View on HN

Depending on the region where they were sold, Samsung Galaxy S20 could use either Snapdragon 865 or Exynos 990 CPUs.

The Mozilla messages fail to mention this information that is essential for any CPU bug, which CPU model was used in the phones with crashes.

It is more likely that the bug is present in the Samsung Exynos 990 CPUs and not in Snapdragon, because Cortex-A77 was used much more widely, so it is improbable for such a bug to not also be noticed elsewhere.

The bug report shows a Mali GPU, which rules out Snapdragon (Adreno GPU). Also, the phone model when googled shows the S20 FE, which has Exynos.

There are two variants.

The standard S20 used Snapdragon in North America, and Exynos in Europe. For the S20FE the Snapdragon version was sold in Europe - which was a selling point by itself.

I did not know that the S20FE had Exynos at all until I just looked it up... Apparently version 1 does, while version 2 uses Snapdragon.

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s20_fe-10428.php

I have it and when I bought it you could get both in Europe. I planned to send it back if it would be exynos...

Given that it's only effecting S20's I'd be surprised if it was the snapdragon 865 as that's in a ton of phones as you point out. I'd expect it to be the Exynos 990, which is Samsung's custom chip for every region but North America and was only used in the S20 series.

Wouldn't be surprised if it was an Exynos bug either. Samsung LSI haven't produced a decent flagship Exynos SOC for multiple generations now. Always behind Snapdragon on overall balance of performance (CPU/GPU/radios), heat and battery life.

I refuse to buy any phone with an Exynos SOC ever since I got screwed with a poorly tuned Exynos 9810 in my S9. Andrei Frumusanu did a great two part article on turning the 9810 when he used to write for Anandtech:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12615/improving-exynos-9810-g...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12620/improving-the-exynos-98...

Meh, decisions decisions. I bought a Pixel 6a which uses Samsung technology for the Google SoC. I bought it anyway because I wanted to install GrapheneOS but since I assumed it was evolved-but-still-Exynos I did hesitate.

There used to be a reason: Exynos variants had unlockable bootloader. Not sure how feasible unlocking is nowadays on the Qualcomm variants.

IIRC locked bootloaders on Qualcomm variants was found on US market phones, with non-US (e.g. Hong Kong) markets having a unlockable bootloader.

One of the crashes listed is https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/f585f1a9-0ed8-4... . That lists a "Mali-G77" GPU, which isn't used by Qualcomm. So the affected chip is probably the Exynos 990, which uses

* Octa-core (2x2.73 GHz Mongoose M5 & 2x2.50 GHz Cortex-A76 & 4x2.0 GHz Cortex-A55) - Global

* Octa-core (1x2.84 GHz Cortex-A77 & 3x2.42 GHz Cortex-A77 & 4x1.80 GHz Cortex-A55) - USA

(from https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s20-10081.php )

Reply on news.ycombinator.com