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First benchmark results of the Galaxy S9 model powered by Samsung’s Exynos 9810 chip show a level of single-core performance that’s unprecedented in the Android ecosystem. Ran by tech outlet AnandTech at MWC 2018, the initial synthetic tests Samsung’s new flagship was put through still aren’t entirely indicative of massive improvements across the board compared to the ultra-premium solution offered by the company’s foundry business last year.
The scores of the new quad-core cluster entailing four big Exynos M3 cores indicates that Samsung managed to exceed the single-core floating point performance by a factor larger than two, whereas its integer-based results were better by over 70-percent compared to the Exynos 8895 which powered the international variants of the Galaxy S8 lineup and the Galaxy Note 8. This essentially puts Samsung’s latest piece of silicon on par with the single-core efficiency of Apple’s A10 powering the iPhone 7 lineup, though still noticeably below the A11 chip found inside the iPhone 8 and iPhone X series. While the Exynos 9810 is advertised as offering speeds of up to 2.9GHz, initial testing suggests the Galaxy S9 implementation of the chip tops out at 2.7GHz and is only reachable when just a single M3 core is active. The scalable frequency peaks of the big cluster see a dual-core configuration drop to 2.3GHz, whereas three or four cores working together won’t run at more than 1.8GHz.
The new Mali G72MP18 GPU is operating at up to 572MHz, an incremental improvement over last year’s Mali G71MP20 whose larger configuration has a cap at 546MHz. Tests meant to evaluate real-world performance such as web browsing and writing showed some concerning results that were barely above those of the Exynos 8895 and noticeably below the Snapdragon 845 meant to power the Galaxy S9 models set to be sold in North America and China. Benchmarks designed to measure everyday usage never come with any claims of perfect accuracy and the software pre-installed on the devices being shown at the Barcelona-based trade show is still experimental, so the results in this segment may improve on the commercial variants of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus.
While the overall CPU performance of the new chip was found to be superior to that of the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm’s latest chip achieved more than 35-percent better results in GFXBench’s Manhattan GPU benchmark which the Exynos 9810 completed with around seven-percent better results than its direct predecessor. T-Rex results were much closer, though none of the differences imply owners of either model will be at a significant disadvantage compared to their peers, as was the case with every Galaxy S generation since the 2015 Galaxy S6 and the problematic Snapdragon 810 which was prone to overheating. Samsung’s new Android flagships are being released globally on March 16.
