Snapdragon vs Exynos
Posted by Kike, on Tue, 5 Mar 2013 1:29 GMT
As you already know if you have been following Nikosite in the past few days a leaked screenshot from the Antutu benchmark has unofficially confirmed an 8 core Exynos processor to be found in the Galaxy S IV, which will hopefully be announced by March 14. However, if you are a true hardware fanatic, you might still have some questions as to which of the two processors is better than the other.
irst of all, it is very important to note that until both are officially benchamarked this is only a prediction based on multiple leaked benchmark scores, as well as other speculative factors.
Historically one of the biggest reasons why a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor should be considered over an Exynos chip has been LTE support. While Qualcomm has been great about integrating LTE into its SoC's for quite some time now it wasn't until the galaxy Note II a few months ago that Samsung was able to integrate an LTE modem into the Exynos platform. There are, in fact, rumors that the Exynos octo is not LTE enabled while the Snapdragon 600 is. This means two things for Samsung: The North American Variant of the S IV will very likely pack a Snapdragon 600 in order to support LTE. Although LTE might appear as not worth giving up the extra power for consider this: As android becomes more and more evolved the difference between even a dual core and quad core phone is becoming a lot less pronounced. In fact, I would be willing to bet that there will be no noticeable difference between the two chips in terms of day to day performance.
In terms of raw computational power Exynos has historically been hard to beat, although Qualcomm has done a very good job of offering a decent amount of competition more recently. It appears this generation that this will stay the same as as it has been before; the Exynos inching ahead of Qualcomm by a very small, hardly noticeable amount. In terms of Benchmarks the Exynos Octo manages to score a very high 24,000 points on the Antutu benchmark while the HTC One with a Snapdragon 600 scores in the same range.
Frankly, with numbers this high there are many other things to worry about that are much more important than computational power, including battery life, features and graphics. So far it has been said a lot around the web that the Exynos Octo offers stellar battery life thanks to it's low-power 4 core backup processor that is used for every day tasks that are not very demanding like checking appointments, reading emails, etc.
The last important bit to consider here related to the SoC is graphics power, which is arguably more important than computational power due to the visual nature of our reality. In terms of graphics it appears as if the Snapdragon 600 will be offering an Adreno 320 GPU, which is the same found on the Nexus 4 and Optimus G. This means graphics performance comparable to that of a 2nd oe 3rd Generation iPad or about 25% higher than the performance of the Galaxy S III. Where the Galaxy S IV gets exciting is in the graphics section, as it packs a PowerVr SGX 544mp GPU that should offer graphics power comparable to that of the latest iPad, levels of performance that have never been seen before on an Android device. Based purely on the numbers right now it would appear as if the Exynos Octo will be superior in terms of graphics to the Snapdragon 600. Whether or not this is enough to push you to lean to one side more than the other is up to you; I believe it will come down to the actual devices powered by each of these chips. Just based on specs both chips are extremely competitive and hard to choose between.
How will you choose? Comment below!
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