Samsung launched two versions of their flagship Galaxy S7 and S7 edge — one powered by a Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor and another running Samsung’s own Exynos 8890 octa-core chip.
While the other internals like the RAM and storage remains the same, these two chips are quite different. The question then became: is one faster than the other?
Well, according to this speed test video, the Exynos 8890 (White) unit is just a touch faster than the Snapdragon 820 (Gold) variant. It launches apps and returns to the home screen just a little bit faster than the SD820 unit, but not so much that it might be terribly noticeable in real world usage.
For benchmarks, the Exynos 8890 unit also performs slightly better in the overall score. However, the breakdown does reveal that it falls behind quite significantly in terms of 3D GPU performance.
This falls somewhat in line with a test ran earlier by PhoneArena where they pitted both devices against each other in a series of benchmarks. In PhoneArena’s test, the Snapdragon variant scored a higher average in both the overall AnTuTu benchmark as well as in the GPU-specific tests. However, the Exynos chip edged it out when it came to browsing benchmarks.
It is worth noting that they ran the test on a Galaxy S7, not an S7 edge, but the end result should be fairly representative of the larger edge model as well.
You can view their findings in the table below:
From their tests, they concluded that the performance difference is nearly negligible as they are very comparable systems.
Comparable in performance, perhaps, but what about things like battery life? Our review unit (Galaxy S7 edge) on moderate usage pulled out a measly 3 hours and 40 minutes of screen-on time, giving us about 17 and a half hours of time on battery. It’s a pretty big difference if you compare it to Dave2D’s review unit (Snapdragon 820) which gave him close to 6 hours of screen-on time with a day and a half on battery with moderate usage.
Of course, that could be down to a number of reasons as well as what he deems moderate usage, but it beggars belief that he could pull out nearly double the SOT on similar usage.
What do you guys think?
