Samsung’s latest phablet Galaxy Note 7 has been praised all over. It delivers a powerhouse performance, and has the world’s best display ever. You probably know that just like the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, the new Note 7 comes in two processor variants. The US version of the Galaxy Note 7 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 while all the other markets will get the Exynos 8890-powered Note 7.
Snapdragon-powered Galaxy Note 7 beats Exynos in graphics
Do the two processor variants of the Note 7 offer the same performance? Qualcomm developed the Snapdragon 820 SoC with some help from Samsung. The Exynos 8890 is Samsung’s in-house processor. The Snapdragon 820 is a quad-core processor with 2.15GHz clock speed and the Adreno 530 GPU. In contrast, the Exynos 8890 is an octa-core chipset with a clock speed of 2.15GHz, and features Mali-T880 GPU.
PhoneArena ran benchmark tests on both versions of the Galaxy Note 7. They found that the Snapdragon version outperformed the Exynos variant by some distance on CPU-heavy benchmarks AnTuTu and Vellamo Metal. But Exynos was better on browsing-focused tests like Vellamo Browser and JetStream.
On the graphics-heavy GFXBench Manhattan test, the Snapdragon with its Adreno 530 GPU scored almost twice that of the Exynos 8890. However, both versions received the same score of 53 on the GFXBench T-Rex. On the Basemark OS II benchmark – which measures the overall performance – both phones are almost equal, though the Exynos version has a slight edge.
Overall, Exynos outperforms Snapdragon
On Geekbench 3, the Exynos version scored 2067 points in the single-core test and 6095 points in the multi-core test. The Snapdragon version lagged behind with 2099 points in the single-core and 4901 points in the multi-core test.
You shouldn’t lose sleep over the performance differences, though. Both versions are powerful, but those who want better graphics may prefer the Snapdragon version. Phone Arena says Exynos is the better option for browsing the web, opening apps, and multi-tasking. The Galaxy Note 7 will go on sale in the United States on Friday, August 19.
