Thanks for the patience on this article, I tried to incorporate as much as possible in the time since we got the devices. I'm aware there's still bits and pieces of information missing such as NAND performance, charging characteristics and a look at software, however I will have to update those parts at a later date as today was a hard deadline due to upcoming events. As always I'm available for questions via email if necessary.
I found this in the article: "I also have to remind reader that the devices were actively cooled in a reduced temperature environment, this is because the whole benchmark run takes 2-3 hours and we’re trying to look at peak performance. "
Sustained performance must be performance under continuous strain so as to get throttling out of the way. After the iphone throttle fiasco, Anandtech supposedly changed benches to account for any throttling.
very good article. out of interest: in the web browsing battery test: is the Samsung Galaxy s9 PS (E9810) the 9+ Exynos? it seems to be substantially better than the standard S9. also, where does that value of 9.66 come from? you mentioned you didn't have a S9+ Exynos available for testing.
Thou did an amazing job explaining/analysing why the Exynos performs so bad in practice for a SOC with such powerful cores. THANK YOU for that as it has been missing from every other test, leaving readers speculating. I hope SAMSUNG can address these problems and shame on them for releasing a devise with such a bad tuning! Makes them look bad and incompetent, honestly, their software/kernel team needs a real kick in the but for making the CPU design team look so bad! Perhaps indeed the M3 hasn't caught up to the efficiency of Qualcomm but the (relatively) horrible performance in tests is certainly not due to bad SOC design...
No idea if this is current information, but Andrei has started in the past that he has really spotty reception where he is based; so I believe it is difficult for him to test battery life for cellular connections. Please correct me if I am wrong :)
We've learned a lot about cellular testing and the sheer amount of variables that aren't controllable are crazy. For one I found out the carrier that I was on didn't have CDRX enabled on its base stations which worsened power usage by up to 30% on the handset. Since then I have a different carrier and better signal, but there's still questions about how representative the results are.
For this review I didn't have time to test all devices since I have to do it sequentially while for Wi-Fi testing I can have all devices running at the same time.
Yes. On my recently acquired [ 2 weeks ] I get very long Screen On Times [Qualcomm USAversion] in large part I assume to : ALWAYS have 2 to 5 bars of 4GLTE Signal from Metro PCS/ TMobile Towers- with 4 and 5 Bars inside large Malls (!). [ Phone NEVER changes Bands on Display ]. ■Also - indoors I like low screen brightness. 30% ■I have very few APPS that are allowed to send Notifications. ■No SITES can send Notifications. ■All/ Most Options are OFF or asleep till I need them - Location/Sync/ Wifi/ etc etc etc ■ I use the Battery Maintenance "OPTIMIZE" a few times a day - there is no downside - Apps it puts to sleep come right back. ■ Apps don't choose to turn on things or use Battery as much as I can stop them ...lol.
First Nonremovable Battery Device....so a little overvigilant right now. INCLUDING: not sure IF I will dowload HUGE 750 meg Update File of 'security updates' - I feel it might include constant background running processes and a larger Operating System and cost me battery life. I can browse on 4G LTE 8 to 10 hours with 8 to 10 hours SOT now. With an hour of calls and 45 minutes Youtube included ...7 to 8 hours SOT.
Does it have a UI? Because I see no evidence of that in the index to this review. I haven't owned a Samsung since the S3 -- in Touchwiz still a shi77y thing?
A little interesting that the four 'big' cores are smaller than the four 'little' cores, such that they would have used less die space with 8 of the gold. But I assume that's because more transistors were spent making X performance level more efficient.
Also interesting how much we're still learning anew about the iPhone X display and how much Apple thought of that we still hadn't puzzled out, that the processing is very different than Samsungs despite being made by them.
Samsung "cobbled" color profiles to Android in an effort to provide some color management. Ios is still the only mobile os with a proper color management system. Until Google does the same, ios will be better, even if the iphone has lcd.
Android has had color management since Oreo, so get your facts straight. As for being able to device color modes, that's a different thing entirely, and is not and was not Samsung's way of dealing with color management, as you claim. That's just a made-up lie from your side. Allowing people to choose different color modes is actually a beneficial thing to have. With iOS, the target is to have color accurate images. So whatever images you see, they strictly follow sRGB or P3 gamuts. But on TouchWiz, Pixel UI, etc., people actually have the opportunity to choose more saturated colors, if that is to their liking. So they in essence provide an alternative in an area where Apple doesn't.
Also, it needs to be stated that the S9 has the most color accurate display of any phone out there, as DisplayMate so very clearly noted and tested.
I'm not saying that in its respective color profile the display is not good. I am talking about the OS. You the user are not supposed to choose color profiles. On ios you could have two images side by side, each targeting a different color profile, and the OS will display them correctly. In Android, you must manually switch profiles to match a photo while the other photo will look way off.
Except it isn't. The difference lies in the display drivers. Even Anandtech mention it in this article, about the black clipping, that Samsung ought to be able to be as good as well. Why? Because it's the same panel technology. So clearly the clipping isn't a result of hardware limitation, as is the case with LG's OLED panel in the V30 and Pixel 2 XL.
The big cores are about 3x the size of the small ones - "an A75+L2 core coming in at 1.57mm² and the A55+L2 coming in at ~0.53mm²" - I think you might be getting confused because the big core cluster wraps around the small ones in a backwards L shape, with 2 cores at the same height as the small ones and the second pair below.
It's still fascinating to me that Qualcomm and Samsung alike seem to be losing ground to Apple -- aside from some of the graphics tests, the A11 fares better overall in cross-platform benchmarks. Used to be that there was some degree of leapfrogging between QC/Samsung and Apple, but the S845 and E9810 are really just catching up.
True, Most of the talented developers at XDA nowadays focus more on the UX, Although there were a few long time back who had both but since Android changed a lot and the SoCs have increased in complexity, SD80x platform had bins and voltage control was easy but with the SD820 platform the voltage planes have increased even though can still be customized but need significant skill to micro optimize unlike the OMAP and the 800 and others.
Apple is just banking on faux peak figures and OS knit with their tight integration optimizing for limited space of UI on iOS, they certainly have benefits but the downsides massively outweigh these advantages about the walled garden.
They are not faux. If anything, the long-term testing in cooled environment is "faux", because nobody uses their smartphones as compute farms. When you start an app or open a webpage, the process runs for seconds at most, so that is what matters most in the CPU/memory/flash department. Only sustained performance which matters is games, on the GPU side of things.
The A11 was not subjected to the same grueling benchmarks like the Samsung devices here. By that I mean measuring throttle propensity or SoC efficiency. The Snapdragon is pretty good taking into account die size and overall lower TDP.
Apart from Samsung's poor scheduler it seems that in raw chip design at least Samsung is closer than it ever was. Just look at the Geekbench scores that are always parroted without other insight on every other tech site.
Apple throttle gate with their untamed power and poor efficiency is clear to everyone and elephant in the room about their nasty practices. This article proves that more by changing the Sustained and Peak benches. A series is so bad, worst.
Qualcomm and S.LSI are light years ahead of that abomination. PLUS despite the flaws with Exynos platform, that's the only device with the brilliant Hardware with all features and no anti consumer bs which has a BL unlock. Thus allowing to at least get a better optimized custom Kernel despite development being hard over the SD platform.
You don't seem to understand what "throttle gate" was about. It had nothing to do with "untamed power" or "poor efficiency". That issue was strictly a means of dealing with old batteries that were in very poor condition. Full stop. Apple's A series chips are the envy of the industry and Qualcomm and Samsung are in no way shape or form ahead.
Meh. Samsung makes some great hardware but their software, bloat, and other ROM issues make it not worth it. Having gone back and forth between Samsung to Nexus to LG to Samsung to Pixel there is simply no comparison to me. Samsung should drop their entire software staff and just do default Android. Save themselves a ton of cash and make a better product with less effort.
If you have more than one app installed by default which does the same, it is bloat. Browsers? Mail clients? Etc etc etc. And what Bixby offers which Google Assistant does not?
Not really, I remember the Galaxy S3 days (my last Samsung phone) being full of bloat but I have the Note 8 and there's no bloat at all (besides Bixby which I turn off).
The graphs on the spec page are kinda confusing me. Are the bars on the right side the performance? Oh the left side, are the numbers indicating average power and the bars the total power? You might want to make that a bit more clear, since it took me a while to figure out.
He states that the left axis has two numbers (average power & total energy used), and given the title is the graph (spec) the right axis must be the score achieved. If you look at the bottom of the graphs it has two arrows that point in opposite directions that say something like lower is better (for left axis) and higher is better (for right axis).
See bottom of the graph. Left is power used, right is performance achieved for that older. There is a trade off, as seen in the later run with power saving on: performance for Samsung drops to 2016/2017 level but power usage for the task (and thus efficiency) is ahead of everyone. Andrei attempted to calculate between this and full power what the efficiency would be when the Samsung SOC was tuned to perform like the Qualcomm and estimated a gap of 4-8%. Not too bad but all of it overshadowed by the horrible DFS setting which kills day to day performance.
He actually says that if you extrapolate the efficiency in PS to match the perf is the sd845 you'd still see the efficiency (of the 9810) lagging. I'd be interested in seeing the efficiency of the sd845 if you reduced it's perf to those of the 9810 when running in PS.
Obviously, that's the whole point. What I'm speaking of is extrapolated efficiency in BOTH directions. We've seen the exynos perf/Joule with both the default governor and the power saving governor. What we haven't seen is the something similar for the 845. It too is going to have it's highest efficiency somewhere towards the middle of its OPPs. Iow, it would be nice to have the perf/Joule curve over the various OPPs for both of these chips.
I really appreciate your explanation of the black clipping issue on the S9+. Given this, is this a hardware limitation on the S9+'s panel or is it that the S9+ panels are calibrated to have darker blacks? In a not-so-dark room, I noticed that videos on the S9+ looks gorgeous whereas on my older S7 edge, I could see lots of banding in the grey areas. Was this perhaps done intentionally?
The black clipping can be mitigated by adjusting the gamma curve, which I believe can be controlled without root and certainly could be fixed with updates.
Not true. Changing a gamma curve can't change the fact that your panel's minimum "on" brightness is too bright compared too off and thereby noticeable. All changing the gamma curve will do is move where the posterization occurs.
Apple's is the correct solution (dithering) for this sort of problem, until the panel hardware is refined.
Hmm that Exynos peformance and battery life is indeed quite dissapointing. I'm currently still on the Galaxy s5+ and I really wanted to upgrade to this device since it's about time right now. But I'm not going to pay such a high price for a device which has big problems with it's peformance and battery life. My s5+ also has battery life that has never actually been very good (screen on time never exceeding 3 hours mostly between 1 and 2) Device always seemed to be overheating and I couldn't play a game (at the desired performance) for longer than 10 minutes since the Adreno 420 would have dropped from 600mhz tot 240MHZ which made the framerate in the more graphicly intense games going below 30 fps Mostly around the 20fps mark. I'm not planning to go for an experience like that again. It's a shame that they don't sell the Snapdragon version here in The Netherlands. Would have for sure bought that one but i'm not so sure with the exynos variant. I really hope that they can fix these issue's with some software update (and I hope to see an update from you guys if they do ;) But I don't expect it to be honest. sigh I might be waiting another year for the s10 or sX of whatever they're going to call it, if I haven't switched to another brand by that time. We'll see how this will go but for now I'll hold of to buy one.
The S8 hás the best ergonomics, and the S9 might be one of the best, but I submit that S9+ is one of the worst in that regard with the protruding frame digging in the hand like a wire. The matte coating does not help in the grip, either.
Since when did the SD 845 have 4k video recording at 60FPS enabled on the S9 and S9+? Last time I checked, Samsung still hasn't enabled that feature on the S9 or S9+.
This article, as always, is some top-quality stuff. Really enjoyed reading it, Andrei!
As for the CPU: Ah! Hotplugging! We finally meet again after all these years! How's it going ever since you've been banned from this planet? ;-)
Honestsly: I don't think that a company like S.LSI would seriously start fiddling around with deprecated mechanics like hot-plugging and slow asf DVFS scheduler settings, if there wouldn't be a major architectural/implementational flaw within the M3 cores.
This might sound like a far-flung theory, but could it be possible that there might be something wrong with the way how the M3 cores handle power-gating in a way that it just takes the CPU way too long to "warm up" cold blocks (like Register files, INT- & FP-Units etc.) that aren't utilized, which kind of translates into these terrible response times? While this might only explain the poor DVFS implementation, I don’t really find a reason why „hot-plugging“ should be the way to go for any sane semiconductor engineer or BSP developer.
Yes: It’s easier to implement and it costs less transistors (and wiring as well), but with modern process nodes, the added transistor budget simply wouldn’t even matter when you compare it with the huge amount of logic that’s there. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the hardware actually supports a more fine-grained control (with stuff like WFI for instance...), but at some point the BSP developers simply said „well, this stuff has already been working for us in the 5410 and 5420, so let’s go!“. Duh.
On the GPU side of things though, it doesn't look as bad as I initially suspected: S.LSI greatly increased their effort into improving perf/w of their Bifrost implementation, a big differentiationpoint between HiSilicon's last two generations and the appalling heap of junk of a GPU implementation in form of E8995's G71MP20.
> if the hardware actually supports a more fine-grained control (with stuff like WFI for instance...)
WFI, core power down and cluster power down all work perfectly as intended and are being used. If they wouldn't be then this thing would melt. They use the hot-plugging just to force the scheduler. There's also no way to know which parts are of the S.LSI BSP and which parts are from the mobile division. I'm very sure all of this is likely mobile division additions however it can't be confirmed as they both use the same copyright name (Samsung Electronics) in the source files.
Thanks for clarifying. My apologies, I skipped the part that mentions "...to force thread migrations between the cores...".
Another question: What software build is your S9 running on? The last update (afaik Build RC5) supposedly fixed some performance related issues and I was wondering, if they changed the bias of their governor (or at least tried it).
Thanks for this Andrei, Also this article is pure gold !!
Loved every bit of it from the Architecture to the benches, explanation, the wording, fantastic work there sir.
That Googles ridiculous decision to block Accessibility & the most essential 3.5mm jack mention and honest true facts about it in simplistic way yet hitting the bullseye, and the flow of the article is just marvellous art. Keep it up !!
One more thing I would suggest is, you might consider teaming up with Supercurio from XDA who built the Voodoo sound for Wolfson chips for Audio Analysis would be a great addition !!
The kernel has recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/737157/) completed a, nearly complete, rewrite of the hot-plugging core. This has made it both much faster and more reliable. So, it's very far from deprecated (though I won't speak to the way Samsung is using it here).
Exactly what I thought. After the SD810 the Hotplugging is very bad and inefficient. I wasn't surprised when the initial fantastic analysis was done by Andrei, but its really bad about the Battery life regression. Also I don't get this hype around the A series chips after that massive battery fiasco, they tune them so badly and look at the iPhone internals they barely have metal plate contact for heat transfer. Yeah I agree on the GPU part too surprised to see this. But I think Samsung wanted to have similar performance between the devices and down tuned the CPU in one and GPU in another...pure speculation.
Apple manages to cheat always and damn all these idiotic sites who only show GB and say here's the Exynos and all. I didn't like how Samsung advertised the new SoC chip likes of Apple going for peak and not sustained.
I think that SD85x might have full custom cores like the OG Kryo from 820, I wish that to happen. Feels great to see how Adreno crushes the A11.
Superb article, certainly of quality that lives up to the Anandtech name. I've been waiting for details of the E9810 S9 for ages, and this article is really the only one that explores the reasons for its weird real world vs synthetic performance.
After seeing the S9 initial performance impressions and being in the UK, I decided to go for a pixel 2 XL for myself and an S8 to replace my gfs iPhone 6S. Very happy with both decisions, the pixel 2 XL is so fast and the S8 was a crazy deal.
It is a real pity that performance and battery life are so hampered in the s9810 versions as I have loved my last few Samsungs. But if Google makes another good pixel this year, I can't see myself going back.
I had the Alpha 850M with exynos and the great Wolfson Audio chip and great speakers and Exynos CPU - better Qualcomm. Just got S9 with qualcomm - the first time qualcomm CPU is better. Good long SOT on Metro PCS/ TMobile 4GLTE towers. Experimenting with Camera and just lowering the Fstop value to avoid overexposing.
Interesting about the Exynos's time to ramp up. If it's a very slow approach to DVFS that's kneecapping the Exynos, i wonder if it'll look very different in a few months if they tune all that in updates.
The tragedy in all of this is that you didnt review the Iphone X/8 for some unknown reason and you never have given any reason why. Now why we don't have any Iphone X review? Are you able to answer this question: YES OR NO?
Could it be possible that the kernel is horrible on the exynos because it has to be close to the snapdragons performance Almost double the die size would equal more power needed. Looking at the delay of when the power cores kick in kind of show that. It will be interesting to see custom kernels.
NO MORE synthetic benchmarks! Really, we need better than this and after so many years, it's atrocious that everything is synthetic. Imagine we had this nonsense in PC.... I just can't stand it anymore, don't want to see a single synthetic benchmark ever in a phone review.
Balancing the Exynos perf and efficiency issue is quite thorny. And if they fix the scheduling, battery life goes backwards too. One thing that makes me wonder is the fact that battery life is tested in web browsing. Battery life in web browsing and gaming is important but both are very heavy workloads. Web browsing triggers the big cores quite a lot and a lot more than in other tasks but it just one of the popular tasks on phones. Would be nice to have a more representative workload for battery life testing, I suppose PCMark might be that but can't spend time checking out the documentation right now - as it is, reading this article took forever, started skipping through the display, camera and conclusion sections.
Would also really like to see SD660, MTK P60, SD670, SD636 in such reviews. A SD660 is like 3 times cheaper than a SD845 and quite sufficient perf for almost anyone. SD636 and MTK P60 are even cheaper than Sd660 by quite a bit so I think that's the highlight this year, 8xA53 being replaced by these SoCs in the 10-20$ price band.
There just aren't many common denominators for that on mobile platforms. What apps/games would you suggest? How many people would share your list of apps/games of importance?
Anything is better than synthetic. What happens in this review is a great example because judgements are made about how perf and power are balanced, without any testing in appropriate workloads. The SoC needs to be tuned for actual workloads, and aside from anecdotal evidence, there is no data. AT loves to say that it's data driven but if you don't have the relevant data.... You can't determine the color of the sky by licking a wall. Synthetic benchmarks are a best effort from a developer but they can never match real world apps. PCMark for example, some phones with 8xA53 at 2GHz can score over 5k points so almost as much as the Exynos here. It's been 10 years and nobody makes any effort to review phones. Even battery life, it's either synthetic or browsing with nothing else going on, utterly unrealistic.
You can profile individual apps & use them while doing so but the results will vary to much even if your usage is minor like for instance video player & same video. Simply Android platformom has to much back processes and noise for reliable measuring especially if those are lite tasks.
Do you understand the sub tests in something like Geekbench for example? Are you going to claim that they are not representative of real world functions that your phone uses on a regular basis? Screaming no synthetic benchmarks like a lunatic without offering a better and generally accepted alternative is not helpful.
Oh FFS. Different benchmarks test DIFFERENT THINGS. What you call a synthetic benchmark is a great test of very specific parts of the CPU or memory system. If you don't care about details, don't freaking look at the synthetic benchmarks and go straight to whatever whole system benchmark it is that floats your boat.
But don't throw a hissy fit because the guys who ARE interested in **CPU** performance don't want to see numbers that are fscked up by the OS behavior, the performance of the flash, or whatever other random nonsense gets it to confuse the issue.
Of course, synthetics at constant max load have never reflected real world performance of mobile devices. We know this. What I like about these deep dives is the fact that you can evaluate the data yourself and make educated assumptions about what one might expect. Here's a rough summary of what I believe is applicable to both chips in the S9 with the current firmware:
- Exynos is the faster chip. But it's handicapped for feature and performance parity with the SD. Optimizations in Oreo might have contributed to how such a conservative scheduler passed QC. - Snapdragon will be snappier (no pun intended) in certain workloads and general app load times. - Exynos will last longer in games, video playback and streaming. - Snapdragon might last longer in web browsing. - Snapdragon Will last longer in video and voice calls in unoptimized messaging apps.
These are examples I thought of quickly. It's funny, but I also watch some youtubers doing their "tests". Combine these tests with the data presented here and there you go.
For me, the winner is - the one that didn't compete here: the S8+ (with the 835 chipset). Seriously. With the S9/9+ now out, an S8 or S8+ can be had for hundreds of $ less than the corresponding S9 or S9+ , and that makes the S8 or S8+ right now the best value for money among higher-end Sammys. To boot, nobody will notice it's last year's model, as the S8 and S9 look almost identical. IMO, the main upside for an S9+ is the camera, especially the video capabilities, but, at what a price -ouch!
Processors: Progress - What progress? The 845 did a bit better than the 835, mostly by being clocked higher (and eating a bit more power), while the new M3-based Exynos was really disappointing. I am also disappointed with Qualcomm's 845, and here is why: the 845 is manufactured in the (supposedly) more energy efficient 10 nm LPP (Samsung's newest and hottest), so - where are the power savings? I can't help but wonder how an 835 manufactured in 10 nm LPP would have fared? As is, the 835 mostly holds it's own where it counts (real life situations), and is far from being outclassed by the 845 (or the M3 Exynos, but that is kicking a chip when it's down). Lastly, regarding Andrei's comment on Samsung's software: right on. Samsung has pretty consistently made the best or among the best Android smartphones out there - I have owned a few of them. But, while Samsung's hardware generally get's a A or A- , the software that Samsung loads (burdens) their phones with has ranged between annoying to debilitating; apparently, that carelessness on the software side extends all the way down to low-level programming this time - not good. Several years ago and for a short time, one could buy a Samsung phone with stock Android from Google directly. While I realize that won't happen again any time soon, I would love to see an S8+ (835) with just plain-vanilla Android 8.1 (or 9?), no skin, no bloatware. I might even buy one, before they're gone.
That IS frames/Joule, but rather than confuse people who don't know what a Joule is they kept it in the units they calculated it from and that people are more familiar with.
Thank you for this detailed review, really the best I've seen so far. Do you know if the issues with the Exynos scheduler are fixable via software update from Samsung, or do you think the problems lie deeper and the hardware needs fixing?
I bet if they fix the dvfs you get decent performance. If they then make sure not to fire the cores for too long at high speed battery life could even improve... race to idle and all that?!?
Yup. Android just isn't ready yet for the 9810, too much unnecessary CPU utilization. Here's hoping that next major update eases up the OS clutter and improved UI rendering. The s9 duo, at a discount, would be too hard to resist. But that's a year from now...
EXACTLY! I am lobbying for S10 PRO with same features BUT thicker body and 4000 Mah battery from the Active - at about $100 more. Samsung might do it IF demand is there. Has to be a 2 year phone at the price . I use my phone as a laptop. So .....
Really impressed with how well the S9 and V30 manage the contrasty night scenes--dark areas are there and bright areas aren't blown out (and e.g. even the streetlights aren't as huge white blobs as they are with the others). Just from what I'd previously heard, I'd've expected the Pixels' HDR+ or Huawei's monochrome sensor trick to do better. Latest gen sensors are hard to beat I guess.
Great article with lots of interesting information about the two SoCs. I wonder if there will be a follow up or a post with some information on the less generic Android phone capabilities. It will be interesting to see how the devices perform with the DeX dock (the S9 should support the original one or it's DeX pad exclusive?) or if there will be issues with sustained performance when using Gear VR or Daydream.
Is it just me or are there A LOT of small grammar typos/errors through out this article? E.g. first sentence in the S9 and S9+: Major Differences and Design should have a period changed to a comma. In the third to last paragraph on the first page I believe there should be a comma after finally. In the paragraph under the 845 die shot there should be a comma after naturally and a "the" before "die size." The last sentence in the paragraph under that one makes no sense; did you mean to have a "see" after "here we"?
Just a few I caught reading through the early parts closely. I noticed a bunch while reading through the whole thing but I'm too lazy to catch em :P
You guys probably should proof read it. Great writing, but there's just a bunch of errors here and there throwing me off.
I don’t think they have an editor or have another one of the guys proofread - it’s always a bit harder to do your own editing/I don’t get the impression that they are the best writers per se. Some of it is the haste in which they have been posting articles recently half finished with multiple updates. I don’t think they have the funding or perhaps management, not sure what happened but AT definitely has been on a downward slide since Anand himself left. Still great in-depth articles and good tech though, I’m not being a hater just honest with my opinion. This is still my first or second stop on my daily tech reading.
> It’s curious to see that both the Galaxy S9’s showcase what seems to be worse sustained performance even though efficiency should have gone up – it’s possible that Samsung decided to limit the S9 to lower sustainable TDPs for cooler devices or longer battery life. We’ll have to verify this theory in another Snapdragon 845 device in the future – the sustained GPU performance might be higher in that case.
What is the difference between auto vs pro auto? I understand that in pro auto you can choose the aperture f1.5 vs f2.4, but why would pro auto produce more acurate exposure as compared to regular auto (as shown in the purple power macro pictures)? In pro auto, the only variable is the difference in aperture, but yet both pro auto shots (in f1.5 and f2.4) produce more accurate exposure than the full auto mode. Any idea why?
I found this out by chance, but I'm almost 100% positive that sensor image stacking multi-frame noise reduction are ONLY being utilized in full Auto, because those enhancements are only applied in jpegs. When you switch to pro mode, the app switches all that of because it assumes that RAWs are needed.
You're getting a "different" exposure because you're only getting 1 unprocessed image, and a "secondary"/complementary jpeg for fast sharing.
I have read that it does. And you get premium audio in BOTH versions of CPU. Remember when you got the premium Wolfson Audio Chip only on Exynos Models previously ? It's not Wolfson any more but supposedly up to 32bit 196K although not 100% sure- something I read . Dolby Atmos is great though IMO. It would be nice on the fantasy S10 Pro in addition to a 4000MAH battery to have a way to digitally input audio at full resolution ...like a Protools Mix etc.
What an incredible review. It was exhausting to read but in the end it was more than worth it. The degree of thoroughness and precision the review went for is simply hard to believe. The camera section in particular is particularly enlightening in more than one regards. The perfection the review aims for while comparing more than a dozen of phones is never before seen in a smartphone review, and the beautiful scenery the reviewer chose not only makes it easier for readers to compare the results themselves, but also gives a hint of the reviewer's taste, which, I think, adds to the persuasiveness of the reviewer's opinion. I found myself in agreement with the reviewer's assessments as I followed through one scenery at a time. (with the exception of Night Scenic 1, where I thought the S9 did better than the competition) I am also grateful the review did not waste anyone's time nor degraded itself with silly stuff like AR Emoji or make-up picker (?) that other reviewers are seemingly delighted to cover without self-awareness.
While the rest of the so called reviewers are going gaga over the geekbench scores of the Exynos, the real deal, as always, explained better on Anandtech. With such basic performance handicaps, I sometimes wonder whether Samsung should be spoken in, in such high regard in the Android space. Their software is poor, the only thing that they are good in, the hardware, turns out isnt as good as thought and yet no one seems to have problem with these kirf devices being priced almost on a similar level as the iPhone. As always Samdung does not know it any better.
All reviewers go gaga for geekbench scores with iphones/ipads as well. In this case the GB scores prove that at least in chip design Samsung has made a huge leap. As the review has outlined, the problem lies with the scheduler and DVFS which Samsung can and should address.
If "Samdung" is so bad at hardware design, how do you call Apple's high priced iphones of the last 3 years that could not sustain chip performance and had to be throttled so as to not crap out. All initial reviews were glowing but they were all impervious to the impeding throttling.
Dude, you really do yourself no favors by struggling so hard to criticize Apple. Apple's throttling has NOTHING to do with the CPU per se (ie the CPU is not generating excessive heat beyond spec, or because it has been running too fast for too long), it has to do with the BATTERY and with a concern that, if CPU performance were to spike the battery could not supply enough current.
Very different problem, nothing to do with the CPU design. A real problem yes but totally irrelevant to the issues being discussed here.
Apple's big CPU and GPU are susceptible to thermal throttling when running sustained workloads too.
Also, having to throttle a processor within a year of sale because its transient current requirements overwhelm the power delivery system is most definitely a design flaw.
My wife’s 6S is still working at 100% after several years, I get the feeling the amount of people affected is overblown as pretty much anything anti-Apple is. I do think Apple needs to look at a better way of dealing with this but it’s also not the armeggedon somemake it out to be. I am far from a Apple fanboy but I do like their iOS products but I am sure someone will make a retort of that nature. I’d say the same thing about the Samsung chip - not great but it is performant, perhaps if we stop thinking each year a new phone should blow us away it would help us be more realistic.
"In this case the GB scores prove that at least in chip design Samsung has made a huge leap" - Please explain huge leap here? The new chip barely outperforms the older SOC.
I am very disappointed with both SoC's. Qualcomm wasted so much space on bad L4 cache which only added to latency & generally wasted more. The 30% is enormous even if new A75 cores are 35% bigger (would be 50% with ARM's L2 reference cache size) I don't know about A630 vs A540 size but if it grown-up let's say 10% the cores & GPU would together accommodate for around 15~20% leaving L3 & L4 responsible for the rest. Would be much better they used it for GPU as it could had been 2x the size then. I am also very disappointed with new cache hierarchy as it turns out to be stupid and a waist of silicone. Seams to me neither SoC used good scheduler nor scheduling by the looks of things it seems Samsung used the CAF HPM sched settings for Snapdragon SoC very aggressive patched interactive without any restraints whatsoever & no hotplug whatsoever which is very south from optimal, reference QC platform seams to had at least used hotplug (as their is no other way to explain the difference of almost 1W in GPU testing as two vs four A75's active). On the other hand seems Samsung used Power aware schaduler instead HPM & very granulated hotplug producing very bad results as those are directly confronted two things & when splashed together can only result in catastrophic result. I prefer HPM configured to be used with limited task packing and a high priority tasks enabled with significant increase of time interval for it (so that it can skip CPU sched limit), for CPU sched interactive traditional not patched with tree step load limitations (idle so that it doesn't jump erratic on any back shade task, ideal that is considered as best sustainable leakage for given lithography & max sustainable for two core's [only on big cores] i also use boost enabled & set to ideal frequency one [same as in interactive]). Preferred to use core_ctl hotplug disabled for the two little & two big cores so that they never get switched off from it. I won't go further in details about it hire as its pointless. I find this idea balanced between always available/needed/total performance as most of the times two of each course are enough for most of tasks & if not it's not a biggie to wait for other two to kick in. There is a minor drow back in responsiveness on lite task's but actually it works as fast as possible on hard one's flagged as heavy tasks like for instance Chrome rendering. It's also very beneficial to GPU workloads where even switching of two little core's and giving even 100~150mv headroom to GPU means much.
Sorry for getting a bit deep regarding how complete scheduling mechanism should be done but I had an urge to explain how it should be done as it's so terrible done in the both cases examined hire.
It's not at all clear that the hpm is meaningfully better (much faster or much more power efficient) than a proper schedtune + energy model implementation. Scheduling is just ridiculously hard. Adding the constraints of: soft-realtime requirements, minimal battery usage, AND an asmp and you've got the current situation where there's not yet a consensus design. We are, however, starting to see signs of convergence, imho.
Ouch. The Exynos S9 is just barely better than the Exynos S7. :( And that's what Canada's going to get.
Here's hoping they can improve things via software updates. Was considering the S9 to replace the wife's now dead S6. She's been using my S7 for the past two months while I limp along with a cracked-screen Note4. Other than the camera and screen, this isn't looking like much or an upgrade for being two generations newer.
Maybe we'll give the ZTE, Huawei, and Xiaomi phones another look ...
Thanks for the excellent in depth report. I think you're being a bit unfair to the cache architecture of the S845: adding any cache at all will add latency when accessing DRAM instead of having none at all. There are use cases where additional cache is useful, and although any accesses that spill over into DRAM pay a penalty, anything prior to that sees quite a benefit.
Is that much of the performance deficit of the 9810 in the "System Performance" in every test attributable to DVFS? Surely the Javascript related benchmarks like Speedometer and WebXPRT are running full tilt without so many UI calls?
Interesting that the Adreno 630's sustained performance is close to the Mali's peak performance in many of those benchmarks. Also Are Adreno 500 series gpus 64 ALU per core?
"One thing to note as interesting is the difference in scaling on the Exynos 9810 and Snapdragon 845 between both integer and floating point average power. Samsung’s power only increases 8% for floating point while Qualcomm/ARM’s solution sees a larger 30% jump. I don’t know if this points out to more efficient floating point execution engines on Samsung’s part or if ARM has the more efficient integer core."
I have no clue where these numbers come from looking at the tables.
Thanks for the highly insightful and detailed analysis of the SoCs, AnandTech never dissapoints!
Looks like mobile SoCs aren't really limited by area anymore especially with screens getting bigger, they got more room to flex. But what in the hell does it take ARM 24.53mm2 only to be slower in peak performance than Qualcomm's 11.69mm2? It might be how their SIMDs are only 4-wide compared to the traditional 32 (Nvidia) or 64 (AMD and Qualcomm) which requires a lot more control logic. Although ARM's architecture seems not that far behind in efficiency just more conservative in their clocks so they could actually go to 5w and match upto Qualcomm's peak performance in GFXBench 3.1 offscreen.
Would be nice to get some more info on the sustained performance metric. A graph-plot of FPS over time would've been the best way to show this in action. I feel the sustained performance is more of a DVFS characteristic than SoC efficiency so it would be nice to see how they adjust clock-frequencies relative to load and thermals.
How is power at idle and/or A55 load for Exynos vs SD845? The gap in battery life is likely way too large to be only about the big cores, unless the testing methodology is flawed in a big way.
I just read an article about how the price of the iPhone may have been to much for some, I read the whole article and there was not 1 mention of Samsung, I said to myself.. " they can do an iPhone article with out mentioning Samsung but they can't do a Samsung article with out mentioning Apple" sure enough this was the next article I clicked on and boom.. in the first paragraph there is a apple mention.. I stopped reading after I saw the word apple..
Any iPhone X review would mention Samsung I am sure if only because they manufacture the screen... but a pure price arti ce can easily talk about Android in general. Anyway you missed the best galaxy S9 review on the web.
Although I can somehow relate to your point of view, ignoring Apple in an article that is mainly focused on actual user experience and real life orientated workloads would be the dickmove #1 due to the fact that - even after all these years - Apple still generally makes devices that are among the best when it comes to real life use cases and responsiveness.
Devices like the Pixel phones with their heavily tuned EAS scheduler and optimized components (both hard- and software) are actually pretty much equal to Apple‘s counterparts, but their marketshare is...well...kind of underwhelming IMHO. The fact that Google can optimize their devices without any control over the „main“ silicon, whereas Samsung totally sucks in this regard, even though they could do a full stack optimization, is really interesting, but staggering at the same time.
In any case: You should seriously consider reading the article, it‘s pretty much the best out there.
Let's see. Pg1 says Samsung is Apple's biggest competitor. Pg2 talks about Samsung's screens Pg3 has Samsung devices in the benchmark tables Likewise for battery life. Likewise for camera performance.
Essential 2? Given small real-life difference between 845 and 835, Essential PH-1 is still a great device. And very appropriately priced. Nothing to wait there.
All the S9 did was made me appreciate my S8+ more, of which I only bought because of generous employer benefits. Without which I wouldn't even have cared about these overpriced flagships.
I pointed this out in your S9 launch article, and apparently I have to make my point again: neither light nor depth of field is the reason for the aperture change - it's purely to combat distortions and lack of sharpness in the image due to the combination of a large aperture and tiny, tiny glass.
Why? When it comes to depth of field, one needs to factor in not only the aperture, but also the crop factor (sensor size relative to standard 35mm film). As such, f/1.5 on a standard cell phone 1/2.3" sensor is roughly equal to f/8.4 on a 35mm sensor, or f/5.6 on an APS-C sensor. This is one of the main photographic advantages of large-sensor cameras: that you can get shallow depth of field with lenses that are actually possible to manufacture.
An example: https://dofsimulator.net/en/?x=EAyAeuF3AAAIJEwkAAA... As you can see here, with a 1/2.3" f/1.5 sensor, focusing on a subject 3m away gives you an in-focus area of ~43m - this is NOT too little, not by any measure. Moving the subject to 5m gives you effectively infinite focus, with everything from 1.9 to infinity being in the focal plane. You'd need your subject at less than .5 meters for DoF to be an issue - which it would be with most cameras at that distance.
On the other hand, it's well known that for large apertures, anything but the best glass will lead to aberrations and distortions in the image, and a general loss of sharpness across the frame. Look at even a single DSLR lens review - they're _always_ sharper when stopped down. With a lens stack this tiny, there's no feasible way to control this - it's likely physically impossible to avoid aberrations and distortions at an aperture number like this. Hence, the variable aperture.
Now, AT is usually very accurate in their reporting. Could you PLEASE correct this? Pretty please? Since you claim to be doing a deep-dive into the camera, this is not a good look.
To clarify: You say that "The F/2.4 aperture in day-light shots is not a gimmick and very much an advantage to the S9 as its deeper depth of field is noticeable in shots, producing sharper images than the F/1.5 aperture." This is a misunderstood conclusion. The added sharpness is largely not due to a deeper depth of field, but rather due to the stopped-down aperture resulting in a generally sharper image. This conflates two different characteristics, focus depth and lens/optical sharpness. These are not the same. If you did a more rigorous test where both cameras focused on the same spot (ideally not in the centre of the image) in a scene with sufficient depth, or conversely shot against a flat target with a lot of detail, you'd likely see this pretty clearly, as _even the focal point_ would be sharper at f/2.4. If this was due to depth of field, both settings would be equally sharp at the focus point, while what you're saying here is that f/2.4 is sharper _across the image_. That's a typical effect of a smaller aperture improving sharpness, not of the smaller aperture restricting DoF.
" _even the focal point_ would be sharper at f/2.4"
If it is the center, it might not be so because with such tiny sensor, at f/2.4 maximum resolution is diffraction-limited. Need the exact size of the sensor to confirm, but I am almost sure than even at f/1.5 Airy disk is bigger than a pixel.
Any chance they Samsung could fix their “slow-and-steady” DVFS approach with software updates? Given the actual state of things, Snapdragon 845 phones are the one to buy this year (I'm thinking Oneplus 6)
With due respect to the author and the site, I have to believe that most of the extensive tests and their results will not affect the avg day-to-day usage of this device.
I am already seeing the panic this review has created on reddit, with many people now re-thinking whether to purchase or not...
Yes, most youtube/site reviewers don't go as deep as this, but a problem so steep would have been felt.
I would advice my fellow mates here not to lose sight of the fact that this is the best android phone you can buy right now.....irrespective of the choice of chip.
"With due respect to the author and the site, I have to believe that most of the extensive tests and their results will not affect the avg day-to-day usage of this device."
While I'm happy to have a super-fast phone with crappy battery life, I'm not happy to have an average-speed phone with crappy battery life. IE, I have a Exynos Note 4 which is fast with crappy battery life and it still does the job...
The crappy battery life is going to effect every single user and every one of your friends in America is going to get a better performing phone with better battery life. Day-to-day I'm getting worse performance and battery life; this means I can re-consider my options now I have all the data.
Why shouldn't this review make you reconsider? That's what it's meant to do. Unless you're a Samsung shareholder, I wouldn't pay any attention to this completely normal thing of human society...
The author himself stated that you will not see any difference as an ordinary consumer. Some slight circumstantial scrolling stutters are all he noticed.
Still the Exynos underperforms relative to its advances in chip design.
"The author himself stated that you will not see any difference as an ordinary consumer."
Nope. The fast core only winding up after 0.4s is VERY noticeable as good phones will already finish launching an app or rendering a local HTML in Webview by this time, some time ago.
This review is not really meant to serve as a comparison between other android phones. This review (or rather analysis) is to show how each SOC OEM has progressed over years; and how the actual implementation in products turn out.
Some of us appreciate this level of technological attention to underlying details; irrespective of whether the information affects end user or not.
For "avg day-to-day usage" i think no one really needs to spend on devices above $200 today. A person spending top money will want to know that the product was built with top quality and latest technology feasible; and that is exactly what analysis like this brings to its readers.
I Just upgraded from a Droid turbo 2 to a Google pixel 2 XL I compared it to the S9+ when I asked the salesman what he used he said he liked the pixel 2 XL over the S9+ and he said the pixel 2 XL was cheeper in price my carrier is Verizon I've never owned a Samsung anything so I just took the salesmans word for it I can't tell if I made the right choice. If anyone has compared the two or would like to comment I welcome the feedback
It's been a while since we got a PRO review. Thank you very much Andrei, best stuff as usual.
Anyway, yes, best phone with best features. I'll recommend the device to family and friends, but I won't touch it myself. I knew this won't be changing in production units, but I'm totally disappointed in the default scheduler settings. Samsung is losing a LOT of PR with how much they're holding back this monster version of Exynos. No, feature and performance parity with Snapdragon is NOT acceptable. I thought they'd stop being too damn conservative with ramping up clocks. This is totally unacceptable from an enthusiast perspective. I also thought they'd be upgrading the UFS Nand storage, not the case, also disappointing.
Can this article be updated with the details of the FW that S9 and S9+ were running? (FW and date/month of FW) It will help readers track how long it actually takes Samsung to fix the scheduler.
What is the reason for comparing the smaller model S9 Exynos with the bigger brother S9 Plus Snapdragon?
In my opinion there are too many differences for this years models that can cause 5-10% difference or even more just because of the different performance plans, scheduler, thermals and thus the whole performance behavior, not to mention the extra 2GB that also could affect the overall performance between S9 and S9+ and thus Exynos in S9 and SD in S9+.
Because that's what they were given by Samsung or able to source locally? It's mentioned right in the article that they tried to get the same SoC version in each size but were unable to.
Amazing review, more like scientific analysis. I am surprised to see Snapdragon 845 bases its power advantages over 835 is "smoke and mirrors" short unsustainable bursts. But maybe "always on" laptops will fully utilize its power...
Great to see AT going back at flagship devices. Could you compile all those benchmarky bits of the 2017 devices into a recap or something? Apple and Google both shipped big new things in 2017 that guys just ignored.
Those devices were not deliberately ignored; there was a gap between when I left and when Andrei started where AT did not have a dedicated mobile editor. This is also the reason why there is no iPhone 8/X review.
It seems like the poor CPU performance in the PCMARK and real life usage is due to the conservative tuning of DVFS and scheduler instead of poorly designed hardware architecture. I wonder if this is a result of the normalization done between Exynos / Snapdragon to offset the differing architecture? I hope not, if it is the case then there would not be "future patch" to update the tuning of DVFS and scheduler. What do you guys think?
The article went up two days ago. At the time, two days ago (give or take a few days), I doubt the results are unlikely. Do you have a link to another set of benchmark results (using the same benchmarking methodology, of course)?
The benchmark course was done with an Exynos S9 running the latest software (Andrei confirmed it), and since there hasn‘t been an update so far, I highly doubt that the results are „unlikely“.
Maybe they‘ll try to alter the scheduler & governor bias with future updates, but only Samsung really knows...
How terminal is the poor battery life of the exynos, can software updates theoretically fix it? I bought one last week and wasn't particularly impressed by the battery life then came across this article - i have a 28 day cooling off period to return the device if needed. To me power leakage/ hotplugging seems a pretty terminal issue that can't be addressed with software updates?
I think there are two feasible ways to improve battery life: downclock the chip to SD845 or even SD835 peak performance level and "free up" the current scheduler from conservativeness; or implement a much more advanced scheduler to improve both performance over short bursts and battery life over long term. I think the new DynamIQ system could make more advanced scheduling possible; I have in mind the old Krait architecture where each core had a different frequency; but in Exynos 9810 each core of the big cluster has apparently the same frequency, according to CPU-Z on Youtube videos ..... In the short term, a downclock is the most feasible solution; in the long term, assuming they will insist with 6-wide decoders big cores, they will need to implement the more advanced scheduler
Thanks for the response - I'm loathed to root/ flash a kernel to a brand new device just for the sake of slowing it down and I doubt that Samsung will address the issue before my deadline for returning the handset. It's a very big £850 gamble to hold onto it & hope they fix it - will probably return the device and see if they solve the issue (they must surely come up with a fix before they release the Note with the same SOC!?) or be forced to accept a worse screen on the oneplus/ pixel handsets. :(
A bit late to the party, sorry, but I'd like to ask a question: while it's obviously better to have a 3.5 mm headphone jack, is it not true that getting rid of the jack itself and accompanying electronics, DAC, etc. frees up space and saves weight? Apple seems to have benefited in terms of weight going from the iPhone 6s to the 7 because of the removal of the headphone jack.
Looking at other phones of similar volume but without a 3.5mm jack (like the Huawei P20 Pro and Razer phone), it looks like you get more battery for the loss of your 3.5mm jack (to the tune of ~500mAh)
Removing headphone jack from iPhone has nothing to do with increase a battery size in iPhone 7. Check any teardown of iPhone 7 on internet and it will be crystal clear. This guy added headphone jack himself to iPhone 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA Check Jerry's thoughts on this matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTSN4zWeQ0
I love your comment about headphone jack, and specially the stress you put on it in closing thoughts. I can understand reasoning why Apple erased their headphone jack. They are going to sell millions of their trendy wireless Earpods. Their customers obviously do not care. But even smallest Android manufacturers are kicking out headphone jack in their top models. It is pure ignorance and bad reasoning in my opinion. Hardly any of them will sell significant number of "their" wireless headphones and will lose some customers because of that. If I buy flagship device I want more features, not fewer. All those "trendy" Android phone makers have definitely lost me as a customer.
As a user of both S8 and S8+ running Exynos 8895, I can tell from my observation that both devices performed slightly differently despite of being very similar. One seemed tuned for battery endurance while the other seems tuned for swift performance.
It is my humble request to update the review with differences (or lack of) if AnandTech manages to test Exynos S9+ as well.
Yes. Has a great built in battery monitor that puts apps to sleep but they become immediately available. Also Location OFF unless using GPS ...Avoid having Apps and Sites give you notifications. Avoid unnecessary extra tabs opened. Screen brightness at 30% indoors. I squeeze a lot of SOT on 4GLTE 6 hours browsing 40 minutes of calls 40 minutes of Youtube 20 minutes of emails on a charge. Have not used Camera for a long time yet. 8 to 9 hours SOT.Qualcomm S9 USA not sure what people are doing who get half this. I AM afraid to download the new .75GIG software update...why do they need .75GIG for security patches...? Larger Operating System with constant security in deep background APPS could kill my battery life ...
WOW, A55 cores are so tiny compared to M3, one M3 cores takes as much silicon as 8 A55 cores. In the same amount of silicon, they could have had 1 M3 core and ~28-30 A55s. It would be just as fast in single-thread tasks but much faster AND more energy-efficient in multi-thread ones.
"we see the Snapdragon 845 within spitting distance of the Snapdragon 835’s energy usage throughout most of the workloads, sometimes winning and sometimes losing"
Where 845 is winning in energy usage? What are you talking about? Either something is wrong with your graphs (color coding?), or 820 is significantly better than 835 which is significantly better than 845.
Thank you for putting all the work into this valuable review. But. You did not talk about GNSS - GPS, GLONASS, etc. (and AT has not had a story involving GNSS for 5 years). You can only do so much and it is another world of expertise, but it would be particularly valuable to look into GNSS for this phone. 2018 was supposed to be the year of phones with multifrequency GNSS leading to centimeter accuracy (and more to the point for the average user much better and faster performance in urban canyons, thick forests and other unfavorable environments and times). Broadcomm's BCM4775x series of L1, L5 chips was going to make this happen (but they have remained mum about which phones would use the chip). The problem is that Qualcomm SOCs are unlikely to incorporate their archrival's products, and all the leaks and previews of all the flagship phones for the next year indicate Qualcomm Snapdragon SOCs. Huawei uses non-Qualcomm but their just released p20 uses the previous generation, L1-only Broadcom chip. The only BCM4775x phone that anyone has seen and maybe the only one for the forseeable near future is the Exynos version of the S9+ which Techinsight's teardown and XDA hackers confirm has the BCM54772. It was not announced or documented by Samsung, and XDAers still don't know if it is picking up the L5 signal in an accessible way. What heroic figure(s) could possibly measure and compare GNSS accuracy in recent phones and possibly hack the Exynos S9+ to use L1 and L5 and get the best accuracy?
Does these tests mean, that The E9810 with The CPU-Limiter from The Power Saving Mode activated , is as fast and more efficient than The E8895? BTW:awesome test and i love Hose detailed and fact-based you are.
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Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Thanks for the patience on this article, I tried to incorporate as much as possible in the time since we got the devices. I'm aware there's still bits and pieces of information missing such as NAND performance, charging characteristics and a look at software, however I will have to update those parts at a later date as today was a hard deadline due to upcoming events. As always I'm available for questions via email if necessary.tipoo - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Thanks for the article, it's great!Not to ask for something else as soon as we get something cool, but...About all those A11 benchmarks you have there... ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
id4andrei - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Surely an impeding iphone 8/x review. They don't seem recent though as the a11 is not present in sustained workload benches.Tigran - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Andrei, could you please make clear: what is sustained performance, how is it measured?id4andrei - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
I found this in the article: "I also have to remind reader that the devices were actively cooled in a reduced temperature environment, this is because the whole benchmark run takes 2-3 hours and we’re trying to look at peak performance. "Sustained performance must be performance under continuous strain so as to get throttling out of the way. After the iphone throttle fiasco, Anandtech supposedly changed benches to account for any throttling.
Tigran - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Thanks a lot.Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The lowest performance after the phone reaches thermal equilibrium under constant conditions.Tigran - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Thanks a lot.uishido - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
very good article. out of interest: in the web browsing battery test: is the Samsung Galaxy s9 PS (E9810) the 9+ Exynos? it seems to be substantially better than the standard S9. also, where does that value of 9.66 come from? you mentioned you didn't have a S9+ Exynos available for testing.uishido - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Oh stupid me. Is power saving mode obviously. Never mindjospoortvliet - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Thou did an amazing job explaining/analysing why the Exynos performs so bad in practice for a SOC with such powerful cores. THANK YOU for that as it has been missing from every other test, leaving readers speculating. I hope SAMSUNG can address these problems and shame on them for releasing a devise with such a bad tuning! Makes them look bad and incompetent, honestly, their software/kernel team needs a real kick in the but for making the CPU design team look so bad! Perhaps indeed the M3 hasn't caught up to the efficiency of Qualcomm but the (relatively) horrible performance in tests is certainly not due to bad SOC design...tvdang7 - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
LTE battery test?SirCanealot - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
No idea if this is current information, but Andrei has started in the past that he has really spotty reception where he is based; so I believe it is difficult for him to test battery life for cellular connections. Please correct me if I am wrong :)Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
We've learned a lot about cellular testing and the sheer amount of variables that aren't controllable are crazy. For one I found out the carrier that I was on didn't have CDRX enabled on its base stations which worsened power usage by up to 30% on the handset. Since then I have a different carrier and better signal, but there's still questions about how representative the results are.For this review I didn't have time to test all devices since I have to do it sequentially while for Wi-Fi testing I can have all devices running at the same time.
robertkoa - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
Yes. On my recently acquired [ 2 weeks ] I get very long Screen On Times [Qualcomm USAversion] in large part I assume to :ALWAYS have 2 to 5 bars of 4GLTE Signal from Metro PCS/ TMobile Towers- with 4 and 5 Bars inside large Malls (!). [ Phone NEVER changes Bands on Display ].
■Also - indoors I like low screen brightness. 30%
■I have very few APPS that are allowed to send Notifications.
■No SITES can send Notifications.
■All/ Most Options are OFF or asleep till I need them - Location/Sync/ Wifi/ etc etc etc
■ I use the Battery Maintenance "OPTIMIZE" a few times a day - there is no downside - Apps it puts to sleep come right back.
■ Apps don't choose to turn on things or use Battery as much as I can stop them ...lol.
First Nonremovable Battery Device....so a little overvigilant right now.
INCLUDING: not sure IF I will dowload HUGE 750 meg Update File of 'security updates' - I feel it might include constant background running processes and a larger Operating System and cost me battery life.
I can browse on 4G LTE 8 to 10 hours with 8 to 10 hours SOT now.
With an hour of calls and 45 minutes Youtube included ...7 to 8 hours SOT.
pjcamp - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Does it have a UI? Because I see no evidence of that in the index to this review. I haven't owned a Samsung since the S3 -- in Touchwiz still a shi77y thing?babadivad - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
"Does it have a UI??"You could't interact with it at all if it didn't have a UI.
tipoo - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
A little interesting that the four 'big' cores are smaller than the four 'little' cores, such that they would have used less die space with 8 of the gold. But I assume that's because more transistors were spent making X performance level more efficient.tipoo - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Also interesting how much we're still learning anew about the iPhone X display and how much Apple thought of that we still hadn't puzzled out, that the processing is very different than Samsungs despite being made by them.id4andrei - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Samsung "cobbled" color profiles to Android in an effort to provide some color management. Ios is still the only mobile os with a proper color management system. Until Google does the same, ios will be better, even if the iphone has lcd.generalako - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Android has had color management since Oreo, so get your facts straight. As for being able to device color modes, that's a different thing entirely, and is not and was not Samsung's way of dealing with color management, as you claim. That's just a made-up lie from your side. Allowing people to choose different color modes is actually a beneficial thing to have. With iOS, the target is to have color accurate images. So whatever images you see, they strictly follow sRGB or P3 gamuts. But on TouchWiz, Pixel UI, etc., people actually have the opportunity to choose more saturated colors, if that is to their liking. So they in essence provide an alternative in an area where Apple doesn't.Also, it needs to be stated that the S9 has the most color accurate display of any phone out there, as DisplayMate so very clearly noted and tested.
id4andrei - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
I'm not saying that in its respective color profile the display is not good. I am talking about the OS. You the user are not supposed to choose color profiles. On ios you could have two images side by side, each targeting a different color profile, and the OS will display them correctly. In Android, you must manually switch profiles to match a photo while the other photo will look way off.generalako - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Except it isn't. The difference lies in the display drivers. Even Anandtech mention it in this article, about the black clipping, that Samsung ought to be able to be as good as well. Why? Because it's the same panel technology. So clearly the clipping isn't a result of hardware limitation, as is the case with LG's OLED panel in the V30 and Pixel 2 XL.DanNeely - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The big cores are about 3x the size of the small ones - "an A75+L2 core coming in at 1.57mm² and the A55+L2 coming in at ~0.53mm²" - I think you might be getting confused because the big core cluster wraps around the small ones in a backwards L shape, with 2 cores at the same height as the small ones and the second pair below.tipoo - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Rodger, was just going off what TechInsights had highlighted.tipoo - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Doh, I see now. The bottom line I was looking at is a SoC feature, not a white highlight box, I missed the end of the L.Commodus - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
It's still fascinating to me that Qualcomm and Samsung alike seem to be losing ground to Apple -- aside from some of the graphics tests, the A11 fares better overall in cross-platform benchmarks. Used to be that there was some degree of leapfrogging between QC/Samsung and Apple, but the S845 and E9810 are really just catching up.goatfajitas - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Ogling over benchmarks and putting much weight into them is sooooooo 2006 ;)Quantumz0d - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
True, Most of the talented developers at XDA nowadays focus more on the UX, Although there were a few long time back who had both but since Android changed a lot and the SoCs have increased in complexity, SD80x platform had bins and voltage control was easy but with the SD820 platform the voltage planes have increased even though can still be customized but need significant skill to micro optimize unlike the OMAP and the 800 and others.Apple is just banking on faux peak figures and OS knit with their tight integration optimizing for limited space of UI on iOS, they certainly have benefits but the downsides massively outweigh these advantages about the walled garden.
peevee - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
"Apple is just banking on faux peak figures"They are not faux. If anything, the long-term testing in cooled environment is "faux", because nobody uses their smartphones as compute farms. When you start an app or open a webpage, the process runs for seconds at most, so that is what matters most in the CPU/memory/flash department. Only sustained performance which matters is games, on the GPU side of things.
id4andrei - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The A11 was not subjected to the same grueling benchmarks like the Samsung devices here. By that I mean measuring throttle propensity or SoC efficiency. The Snapdragon is pretty good taking into account die size and overall lower TDP.Apart from Samsung's poor scheduler it seems that in raw chip design at least Samsung is closer than it ever was. Just look at the Geekbench scores that are always parroted without other insight on every other tech site.
Quantumz0d - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Apple throttle gate with their untamed power and poor efficiency is clear to everyone and elephant in the room about their nasty practices. This article proves that more by changing the Sustained and Peak benches. A series is so bad, worst.Qualcomm and S.LSI are light years ahead of that abomination. PLUS despite the flaws with Exynos platform, that's the only device with the brilliant Hardware with all features and no anti consumer bs which has a BL unlock. Thus allowing to at least get a better optimized custom Kernel despite development being hard over the SD platform.
techconc - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
You don't seem to understand what "throttle gate" was about. It had nothing to do with "untamed power" or "poor efficiency". That issue was strictly a means of dealing with old batteries that were in very poor condition. Full stop. Apple's A series chips are the envy of the industry and Qualcomm and Samsung are in no way shape or form ahead.darkich - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Seems like Samsung shows a classic case of teething problems with their big core SoC. Hopefully they iron it out by the release of the Note 9.goatfajitas - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Meh. Samsung makes some great hardware but their software, bloat, and other ROM issues make it not worth it. Having gone back and forth between Samsung to Nexus to LG to Samsung to Pixel there is simply no comparison to me. Samsung should drop their entire software staff and just do default Android. Save themselves a ton of cash and make a better product with less effort.shabby - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
That bloatware is called features, and stock android is missing many of them.peevee - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
If you have more than one app installed by default which does the same, it is bloat. Browsers? Mail clients? Etc etc etc.And what Bixby offers which Google Assistant does not?
Oyeve - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Hardly any bloat at all. Keep trying.goatfajitas - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Are you being serious? Samsung phones are bloated as hell, a bit better than they used to be but still horrible.Shlong - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Not really, I remember the Galaxy S3 days (my last Samsung phone) being full of bloat but I have the Note 8 and there's no bloat at all (besides Bixby which I turn off).goatfajitas - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
That is simply incorrect. Not even remotely close to being correct.Dr. Swag - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The graphs on the spec page are kinda confusing me. Are the bars on the right side the performance? Oh the left side, are the numbers indicating average power and the bars the total power? You might want to make that a bit more clear, since it took me a while to figure out.tuxRoller - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
He states that the left axis has two numbers (average power & total energy used), and given the title is the graph (spec) the right axis must be the score achieved. If you look at the bottom of the graphs it has two arrows that point in opposite directions that say something like lower is better (for left axis) and higher is better (for right axis).jospoortvliet - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
See bottom of the graph. Left is power used, right is performance achieved for that older. There is a trade off, as seen in the later run with power saving on: performance for Samsung drops to 2016/2017 level but power usage for the task (and thus efficiency) is ahead of everyone. Andrei attempted to calculate between this and full power what the efficiency would be when the Samsung SOC was tuned to perform like the Qualcomm and estimated a gap of 4-8%. Not too bad but all of it overshadowed by the horrible DFS setting which kills day to day performance.tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
He actually says that if you extrapolate the efficiency in PS to match the perf is the sd845 you'd still see the efficiency (of the 9810) lagging.I'd be interested in seeing the efficiency of the sd845 if you reduced it's perf to those of the 9810 when running in PS.
lilmoe - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Efficiency @max load =/= @average workload. This isn't a workstation chip.tuxRoller - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Obviously, that's the whole point.What I'm speaking of is extrapolated efficiency in BOTH directions. We've seen the exynos perf/Joule with both the default governor and the power saving governor. What we haven't seen is the something similar for the 845. It too is going to have it's highest efficiency somewhere towards the middle of its OPPs.
Iow, it would be nice to have the perf/Joule curve over the various OPPs for both of these chips.
halcyon - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sedthat's in the "Video evaluation" section
Great review! the kind I expect from Anandtech.
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Had forgotten to replace those paragraphs, fixed.Ian Cutress - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Fixed :)Infy2 - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Thank you very much for a thorough phone review. I had almost lost hope that AT no long publishes such reviews!sturmen - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Did no one else notice the Lorem Ipsum in the "Video Evaluation" section?trenzterra - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
I really appreciate your explanation of the black clipping issue on the S9+. Given this, is this a hardware limitation on the S9+'s panel or is it that the S9+ panels are calibrated to have darker blacks? In a not-so-dark room, I noticed that videos on the S9+ looks gorgeous whereas on my older S7 edge, I could see lots of banding in the grey areas. Was this perhaps done intentionally?jordanclock - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The black clipping can be mitigated by adjusting the gamma curve, which I believe can be controlled without root and certainly could be fixed with updates.name99 - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Not true. Changing a gamma curve can't change the fact that your panel's minimum "on" brightness is too bright compared too off and thereby noticeable. All changing the gamma curve will do is move where the posterization occurs.Apple's is the correct solution (dithering) for this sort of problem, until the panel hardware is refined.
StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
What I am not a fan of is that aspect ratio... I watch allot of media and would have preferred to retain 16:9.Also. Glass. Ugh.
Omega244 - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
3000 mAh (13.47Wh)non-replaceable 3500 mAh (11.55Wh)
non-replaceable
I think the battery specs are swapped on Page 1
TMCThomas - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Hmm that Exynos peformance and battery life is indeed quite dissapointing. I'm currently still on the Galaxy s5+ and I really wanted to upgrade to this device since it's about time right now. But I'm not going to pay such a high price for a device which has big problems with it's peformance and battery life. My s5+ also has battery life that has never actually been very good (screen on time never exceeding 3 hours mostly between 1 and 2) Device always seemed to be overheating and I couldn't play a game (at the desired performance) for longer than 10 minutes since the Adreno 420 would have dropped from 600mhz tot 240MHZ which made the framerate in the more graphicly intense games going below 30 fps Mostly around the 20fps mark. I'm not planning to go for an experience like that again. It's a shame that they don't sell the Snapdragon version here in The Netherlands. Would have for sure bought that one but i'm not so sure with the exynos variant. I really hope that they can fix these issue's with some software update (and I hope to see an update from you guys if they do ;) But I don't expect it to be honest. sigh I might be waiting another year for the s10 or sX of whatever they're going to call it, if I haven't switched to another brand by that time. We'll see how this will go but for now I'll hold of to buy one.lopri - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The S8 hás the best ergonomics, and the S9 might be one of the best, but I submit that S9+ is one of the worst in that regard with the protruding frame digging in the hand like a wire. The matte coating does not help in the grip, either.Zhenocnra - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Since when did the SD 845 have 4k video recording at 60FPS enabled on the S9 and S9+? Last time I checked, Samsung still hasn't enabled that feature on the S9 or S9+.Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
I literally uploaded a 4K60 video on the S845 S9+. They always had it.https://youtu.be/9g88TIi-p2U
N Zaljov - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
This article, as always, is some top-quality stuff. Really enjoyed reading it, Andrei!As for the CPU: Ah! Hotplugging! We finally meet again after all these years! How's it going ever since you've been banned from this planet? ;-)
Honestsly: I don't think that a company like S.LSI would seriously start fiddling around with deprecated mechanics like hot-plugging and slow asf DVFS scheduler settings, if there wouldn't be a major architectural/implementational flaw within the M3 cores.
This might sound like a far-flung theory, but could it be possible that there might be something wrong with the way how the M3 cores handle power-gating in a way that it just takes the CPU way too long to "warm up" cold blocks (like Register files, INT- & FP-Units etc.) that aren't utilized, which kind of translates into these terrible response times? While this might only explain the poor DVFS implementation, I don’t really find a reason why „hot-plugging“ should be the way to go for any sane semiconductor engineer or BSP developer.
Yes: It’s easier to implement and it costs less transistors (and wiring as well), but with modern process nodes, the added transistor budget simply wouldn’t even matter when you compare it with the huge amount of logic that’s there. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the hardware actually supports a more fine-grained control (with stuff like WFI for instance...), but at some point the BSP developers simply said „well, this stuff has already been working for us in the 5410 and 5420, so let’s go!“. Duh.
On the GPU side of things though, it doesn't look as bad as I initially suspected: S.LSI greatly increased their effort into improving perf/w of their Bifrost implementation, a big differentiationpoint between HiSilicon's last two generations and the appalling heap of junk of a GPU implementation in form of E8995's G71MP20.
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
> if the hardware actually supports a more fine-grained control (with stuff like WFI for instance...)WFI, core power down and cluster power down all work perfectly as intended and are being used. If they wouldn't be then this thing would melt. They use the hot-plugging just to force the scheduler. There's also no way to know which parts are of the S.LSI BSP and which parts are from the mobile division. I'm very sure all of this is likely mobile division additions however it can't be confirmed as they both use the same copyright name (Samsung Electronics) in the source files.
N Zaljov - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Thanks for clarifying. My apologies, I skipped the part that mentions "...to force thread migrations between the cores...".Another question: What software build is your S9 running on? The last update (afaik Build RC5) supposedly fixed some performance related issues and I was wondering, if they changed the bias of their governor (or at least tried it).
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The review was done on ARC5.Quantumz0d - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Thanks for this Andrei, Also this article is pure gold !!Loved every bit of it from the Architecture to the benches, explanation, the wording, fantastic work there sir.
That Googles ridiculous decision to block Accessibility & the most essential 3.5mm jack mention and honest true facts about it in simplistic way yet hitting the bullseye, and the flow of the article is just marvellous art. Keep it up !!
One more thing I would suggest is, you might consider teaming up with Supercurio from XDA who built the Voodoo sound for Wolfson chips for Audio Analysis would be a great addition !!
Thank you again ! Looking forward for more.
tuxRoller - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The kernel has recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/737157/) completed a, nearly complete, rewrite of the hot-plugging core. This has made it both much faster and more reliable. So, it's very far from deprecated (though I won't speak to the way Samsung is using it here).Quantumz0d - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Exactly what I thought. After the SD810 the Hotplugging is very bad and inefficient. I wasn't surprised when the initial fantastic analysis was done by Andrei, but its really bad about the Battery life regression. Also I don't get this hype around the A series chips after that massive battery fiasco, they tune them so badly and look at the iPhone internals they barely have metal plate contact for heat transfer. Yeah I agree on the GPU part too surprised to see this. But I think Samsung wanted to have similar performance between the devices and down tuned the CPU in one and GPU in another...pure speculation.Apple manages to cheat always and damn all these idiotic sites who only show GB and say here's the Exynos and all. I didn't like how Samsung advertised the new SoC chip likes of Apple going for peak and not sustained.
I think that SD85x might have full custom cores like the OG Kryo from 820, I wish that to happen. Feels great to see how Adreno crushes the A11.
zer0hour - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Superb article, certainly of quality that lives up to the Anandtech name. I've been waiting for details of the E9810 S9 for ages, and this article is really the only one that explores the reasons for its weird real world vs synthetic performance.Speedfriend - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
After seeing the S9 initial performance impressions and being in the UK, I decided to go for a pixel 2 XL for myself and an S8 to replace my gfs iPhone 6S. Very happy with both decisions, the pixel 2 XL is so fast and the S8 was a crazy deal.It is a real pity that performance and battery life are so hampered in the s9810 versions as I have loved my last few Samsungs. But if Google makes another good pixel this year, I can't see myself going back.
AnandTechGuy - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Wow! Great work Andrei!IPityTheFowl - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Qualcomm in the US still. Someday they'll actually release the galaxy with a Samsung chip...GTRagnarok - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Based on the findings in the article, that day can wait...robertkoa - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
I had the Alpha 850M with exynos and the great Wolfson Audio chip and great speakers and Exynos CPU - better Qualcomm.Just got S9 with qualcomm - the first time qualcomm CPU is better.
Good long SOT on Metro PCS/ TMobile 4GLTE towers.
Experimenting with Camera and just lowering the Fstop value to avoid overexposing.
tipoo - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Interesting about the Exynos's time to ramp up. If it's a very slow approach to DVFS that's kneecapping the Exynos, i wonder if it'll look very different in a few months if they tune all that in updates.lucam - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The tragedy in all of this is that you didnt review the Iphone X/8 for some unknown reason and you never have given any reason why.Now why we don't have any Iphone X review? Are you able to answer this question: YES OR NO?
lopri - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Under web browsing battery test, "Galaxy S9 PS (9810)" Haha.Seattletech - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Could it be possible that the kernel is horrible on the exynosbecause it has to be close to the snapdragons performance
Almost double the die size would equal more power needed.
Looking at the delay of when the power cores kick in kind of show that.
It will be interesting to see custom kernels.
jjj - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
NO MORE synthetic benchmarks!Really, we need better than this and after so many years, it's atrocious that everything is synthetic. Imagine we had this nonsense in PC....
I just can't stand it anymore, don't want to see a single synthetic benchmark ever in a phone review.
Balancing the Exynos perf and efficiency issue is quite thorny. And if they fix the scheduling, battery life goes backwards too.
One thing that makes me wonder is the fact that battery life is tested in web browsing. Battery life in web browsing and gaming is important but both are very heavy workloads. Web browsing triggers the big cores quite a lot and a lot more than in other tasks but it just one of the popular tasks on phones.
Would be nice to have a more representative workload for battery life testing, I suppose PCMark might be that but can't spend time checking out the documentation right now - as it is, reading this article took forever, started skipping through the display, camera and conclusion sections.
Would also really like to see SD660, MTK P60, SD670, SD636 in such reviews.
A SD660 is like 3 times cheaper than a SD845 and quite sufficient perf for almost anyone. SD636 and MTK P60 are even cheaper than Sd660 by quite a bit so I think that's the highlight this year, 8xA53 being replaced by these SoCs in the 10-20$ price band.
lopri - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
There just aren't many common denominators for that on mobile platforms. What apps/games would you suggest? How many people would share your list of apps/games of importance?lopri - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Oh and there is no Fraps on Android or (gasp) iOS as far as I know. One that actually works.jjj - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Anything is better than synthetic.What happens in this review is a great example because judgements are made about how perf and power are balanced, without any testing in appropriate workloads. The SoC needs to be tuned for actual workloads, and aside from anecdotal evidence, there is no data. AT loves to say that it's data driven but if you don't have the relevant data.... You can't determine the color of the sky by licking a wall.
Synthetic benchmarks are a best effort from a developer but they can never match real world apps. PCMark for example, some phones with 8xA53 at 2GHz can score over 5k points so almost as much as the Exynos here.
It's been 10 years and nobody makes any effort to review phones. Even battery life, it's either synthetic or browsing with nothing else going on, utterly unrealistic.
ZolaIII - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
You can profile individual apps & use them while doing so but the results will vary to much even if your usage is minor like for instance video player & same video. Simply Android platformom has to much back processes and noise for reliable measuring especially if those are lite tasks.techconc - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Do you understand the sub tests in something like Geekbench for example? Are you going to claim that they are not representative of real world functions that your phone uses on a regular basis? Screaming no synthetic benchmarks like a lunatic without offering a better and generally accepted alternative is not helpful.peevee - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
Firefox. With an adblocker installed.name99 - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Oh FFS.Different benchmarks test DIFFERENT THINGS. What you call a synthetic benchmark is a great test of very specific parts of the CPU or memory system.
If you don't care about details, don't freaking look at the synthetic benchmarks and go straight to whatever whole system benchmark it is that floats your boat.
But don't throw a hissy fit because the guys who ARE interested in **CPU** performance don't want to see numbers that are fscked up by the OS behavior, the performance of the flash, or whatever other random nonsense gets it to confuse the issue.
lilmoe - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Of course, synthetics at constant max load have never reflected real world performance of mobile devices. We know this. What I like about these deep dives is the fact that you can evaluate the data yourself and make educated assumptions about what one might expect. Here's a rough summary of what I believe is applicable to both chips in the S9 with the current firmware:- Exynos is the faster chip. But it's handicapped for feature and performance parity with the SD. Optimizations in Oreo might have contributed to how such a conservative scheduler passed QC.
- Snapdragon will be snappier (no pun intended) in certain workloads and general app load times.
- Exynos will last longer in games, video playback and streaming.
- Snapdragon might last longer in web browsing.
- Snapdragon Will last longer in video and voice calls in unoptimized messaging apps.
These are examples I thought of quickly. It's funny, but I also watch some youtubers doing their "tests". Combine these tests with the data presented here and there you go.
eastcoast_pete - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
For me, the winner is - the one that didn't compete here: the S8+ (with the 835 chipset). Seriously. With the S9/9+ now out, an S8 or S8+ can be had for hundreds of $ less than the corresponding S9 or S9+ , and that makes the S8 or S8+ right now the best value for money among higher-end Sammys. To boot, nobody will notice it's last year's model, as the S8 and S9 look almost identical. IMO, the main upside for an S9+ is the camera, especially the video capabilities, but, at what a price -ouch!Processors: Progress - What progress? The 845 did a bit better than the 835, mostly by being clocked higher (and eating a bit more power), while the new M3-based Exynos was really disappointing. I am also disappointed with Qualcomm's 845, and here is why: the 845 is manufactured in the (supposedly) more energy efficient 10 nm LPP (Samsung's newest and hottest), so - where are the power savings? I can't help but wonder how an 835 manufactured in 10 nm LPP would have fared? As is, the 835 mostly holds it's own where it counts (real life situations), and is far from being outclassed by the 845 (or the M3 Exynos, but that is kicking a chip when it's down).
Lastly, regarding Andrei's comment on Samsung's software: right on. Samsung has pretty consistently made the best or among the best Android smartphones out there - I have owned a few of them. But, while Samsung's hardware generally get's a A or A- , the software that Samsung loads (burdens) their phones with has ranged between annoying to debilitating; apparently, that carelessness on the software side extends all the way down to low-level programming this time - not good.
Several years ago and for a short time, one could buy a Samsung phone with stock Android from Google directly. While I realize that won't happen again any time soon, I would love to see an S8+ (835) with just plain-vanilla Android 8.1 (or 9?), no skin, no bloatware. I might even buy one, before they're gone.
BigDH01 - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The perf/W graph is confusing to me as it's measured in fps/W. This breaks down into (frames/sec)/(J/s). Why not just frames/joule?Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Because Watts are important to note as a thermal indicator. It gives more information than frames/J.futrtrubl - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
That IS frames/Joule, but rather than confuse people who don't know what a Joule is they kept it in the units they calculated it from and that people are more familiar with.hansmuff - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Thank you for this detailed review, really the best I've seen so far. Do you know if the issues with the Exynos scheduler are fixable via software update from Samsung, or do you think the problems lie deeper and the hardware needs fixing?Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Performance is definitely fixable. Battery life is another matter.jospoortvliet - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
I bet if they fix the dvfs you get decent performance. If they then make sure not to fire the cores for too long at high speed battery life could even improve... race to idle and all that?!?lilmoe - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Yup. Android just isn't ready yet for the 9810, too much unnecessary CPU utilization. Here's hoping that next major update eases up the OS clutter and improved UI rendering. The s9 duo, at a discount, would be too hard to resist. But that's a year from now...robertkoa - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
EXACTLY! I am lobbying for S10 PRO with same features BUT thicker body and 4000 Mah battery from the Active - at about $100 more.Samsung might do it IF demand is there.
Has to be a 2 year phone at the price . I use my phone as a laptop.
So .....
hp79 - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
I would totally buy this if only Samsung didn't mess up with the gross TouchWiz junk and Bixby and all their stupid customization.twotwotwo - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Really impressed with how well the S9 and V30 manage the contrasty night scenes--dark areas are there and bright areas aren't blown out (and e.g. even the streetlights aren't as huge white blobs as they are with the others). Just from what I'd previously heard, I'd've expected the Pixels' HDR+ or Huawei's monochrome sensor trick to do better. Latest gen sensors are hard to beat I guess.Pak0St - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Great article with lots of interesting information about the two SoCs.I wonder if there will be a follow up or a post with some information on the less generic Android phone capabilities. It will be interesting to see how the devices perform with the DeX dock (the S9 should support the original one or it's DeX pad exclusive?) or if there will be issues with sustained performance when using Gear VR or Daydream.
Dr. Swag - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Is it just me or are there A LOT of small grammar typos/errors through out this article? E.g. first sentence in the S9 and S9+: Major Differences and Design should have a period changed to a comma. In the third to last paragraph on the first page I believe there should be a comma after finally. In the paragraph under the 845 die shot there should be a comma after naturally and a "the" before "die size." The last sentence in the paragraph under that one makes no sense; did you mean to have a "see" after "here we"?Just a few I caught reading through the early parts closely. I noticed a bunch while reading through the whole thing but I'm too lazy to catch em :P
You guys probably should proof read it. Great writing, but there's just a bunch of errors here and there throwing me off.
Icehawk - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
I don’t think they have an editor or have another one of the guys proofread - it’s always a bit harder to do your own editing/I don’t get the impression that they are the best writers per se. Some of it is the haste in which they have been posting articles recently half finished with multiple updates. I don’t think they have the funding or perhaps management, not sure what happened but AT definitely has been on a downward slide since Anand himself left. Still great in-depth articles and good tech though, I’m not being a hater just honest with my opinion. This is still my first or second stop on my daily tech reading.North01 - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
> It’s curious to see that both the Galaxy S9’s showcase what seems to be worse sustained performance even though efficiency should have gone up – it’s possible that Samsung decided to limit the S9 to lower sustainable TDPs for cooler devices or longer battery life. We’ll have to verify this theory in another Snapdragon 845 device in the future – the sustained GPU performance might be higher in that case.This is something I'm really curious about.
Robikonobi - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
What is the difference between auto vs pro auto? I understand that in pro auto you can choose the aperture f1.5 vs f2.4, but why would pro auto produce more acurate exposure as compared to regular auto (as shown in the purple power macro pictures)? In pro auto, the only variable is the difference in aperture, but yet both pro auto shots (in f1.5 and f2.4) produce more accurate exposure than the full auto mode. Any idea why?Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
I'm not privy to Samsung's camera algorithms. It is the way it is because it so might be as well the best explanation.lilmoe - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
I found this out by chance, but I'm almost 100% positive that sensor image stacking multi-frame noise reduction are ONLY being utilized in full Auto, because those enhancements are only applied in jpegs. When you switch to pro mode, the app switches all that of because it assumes that RAWs are needed.You're getting a "different" exposure because you're only getting 1 unprocessed image, and a "secondary"/complementary jpeg for fast sharing.
robertkoa - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
Did you try the Pro Mode and just move down minus .5 to .7 on FStop values ?axi6ne8us - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Since it has improved stereo speakers and headphone jack, does it include a 32bit DAC with amplifier?robertkoa - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
I have read that it does.And you get premium audio in BOTH versions of CPU.
Remember when you got the premium Wolfson Audio Chip only on Exynos Models previously ?
It's not Wolfson any more but supposedly up to 32bit 196K although not 100% sure- something I read .
Dolby Atmos is great though IMO.
It would be nice on the fantasy S10 Pro in addition to a 4000MAH battery to have a way to digitally input audio at full resolution ...like a Protools Mix etc.
lopri - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
What an incredible review. It was exhausting to read but in the end it was more than worth it. The degree of thoroughness and precision the review went for is simply hard to believe. The camera section in particular is particularly enlightening in more than one regards. The perfection the review aims for while comparing more than a dozen of phones is never before seen in a smartphone review, and the beautiful scenery the reviewer chose not only makes it easier for readers to compare the results themselves, but also gives a hint of the reviewer's taste, which, I think, adds to the persuasiveness of the reviewer's opinion. I found myself in agreement with the reviewer's assessments as I followed through one scenery at a time. (with the exception of Night Scenic 1, where I thought the S9 did better than the competition) I am also grateful the review did not waste anyone's time nor degraded itself with silly stuff like AR Emoji or make-up picker (?) that other reviewers are seemingly delighted to cover without self-awareness.Lavkesh - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
While the rest of the so called reviewers are going gaga over the geekbench scores of the Exynos, the real deal, as always, explained better on Anandtech. With such basic performance handicaps, I sometimes wonder whether Samsung should be spoken in, in such high regard in the Android space. Their software is poor, the only thing that they are good in, the hardware, turns out isnt as good as thought and yet no one seems to have problem with these kirf devices being priced almost on a similar level as the iPhone. As always Samdung does not know it any better.id4andrei - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
All reviewers go gaga for geekbench scores with iphones/ipads as well. In this case the GB scores prove that at least in chip design Samsung has made a huge leap. As the review has outlined, the problem lies with the scheduler and DVFS which Samsung can and should address.If "Samdung" is so bad at hardware design, how do you call Apple's high priced iphones of the last 3 years that could not sustain chip performance and had to be throttled so as to not crap out. All initial reviews were glowing but they were all impervious to the impeding throttling.
name99 - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Dude, you really do yourself no favors by struggling so hard to criticize Apple.Apple's throttling has NOTHING to do with the CPU per se (ie the CPU is not generating excessive heat beyond spec, or because it has been running too fast for too long), it has to do with the BATTERY and with a concern that, if CPU performance were to spike the battery could not supply enough current.
Very different problem, nothing to do with the CPU design. A real problem yes but totally irrelevant to the issues being discussed here.
Matt Humrick - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Apple's big CPU and GPU are susceptible to thermal throttling when running sustained workloads too.Also, having to throttle a processor within a year of sale because its transient current requirements overwhelm the power delivery system is most definitely a design flaw.
Icehawk - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
My wife’s 6S is still working at 100% after several years, I get the feeling the amount of people affected is overblown as pretty much anything anti-Apple is. I do think Apple needs to look at a better way of dealing with this but it’s also not the armeggedon somemake it out to be. I am far from a Apple fanboy but I do like their iOS products but I am sure someone will make a retort of that nature. I’d say the same thing about the Samsung chip - not great but it is performant, perhaps if we stop thinking each year a new phone should blow us away it would help us be more realistic.Lavkesh - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
"In this case the GB scores prove that at least in chip design Samsung has made a huge leap" - Please explain huge leap here? The new chip barely outperforms the older SOC.ZolaIII - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
I am very disappointed with both SoC's. Qualcomm wasted so much space on bad L4 cache which only added to latency & generally wasted more. The 30% is enormous even if new A75 cores are 35% bigger (would be 50% with ARM's L2 reference cache size) I don't know about A630 vs A540 size but if it grown-up let's say 10% the cores & GPU would together accommodate for around 15~20% leaving L3 & L4 responsible for the rest. Would be much better they used it for GPU as it could had been 2x the size then. I am also very disappointed with new cache hierarchy as it turns out to be stupid and a waist of silicone. Seams to me neither SoC used good scheduler nor scheduling by the looks of things it seems Samsung used the CAF HPM sched settings for Snapdragon SoC very aggressive patched interactive without any restraints whatsoever & no hotplug whatsoever which is very south from optimal, reference QC platform seams to had at least used hotplug (as their is no other way to explain the difference of almost 1W in GPU testing as two vs four A75's active). On the other hand seems Samsung used Power aware schaduler instead HPM & very granulated hotplug producing very bad results as those are directly confronted two things & when splashed together can only result in catastrophic result. I prefer HPM configured to be used with limited task packing and a high priority tasks enabled with significant increase of time interval for it (so that it can skip CPU sched limit), for CPU sched interactive traditional not patched with tree step load limitations (idle so that it doesn't jump erratic on any back shade task, ideal that is considered as best sustainable leakage for given lithography & max sustainable for two core's [only on big cores] i also use boost enabled & set to ideal frequency one [same as in interactive]). Preferred to use core_ctl hotplug disabled for the two little & two big cores so that they never get switched off from it. I won't go further in details about it hire as its pointless. I find this idea balanced between always available/needed/total performance as most of the times two of each course are enough for most of tasks & if not it's not a biggie to wait for other two to kick in. There is a minor drow back in responsiveness on lite task's but actually it works as fast as possible on hard one's flagged as heavy tasks like for instance Chrome rendering. It's also very beneficial to GPU workloads where even switching of two little core's and giving even 100~150mv headroom to GPU means much.Sorry for getting a bit deep regarding how complete scheduling mechanism should be done but I had an urge to explain how it should be done as it's so terrible done in the both cases examined hire.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
It's not at all clear that the hpm is meaningfully better (much faster or much more power efficient) than a proper schedtune + energy model implementation.Scheduling is just ridiculously hard. Adding the constraints of: soft-realtime requirements, minimal battery usage, AND an asmp and you've got the current situation where there's not yet a consensus design. We are, however, starting to see signs of convergence, imho.
zeeBomb - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
I came...and I finally sawphoenix_rizzen - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Ouch. The Exynos S9 is just barely better than the Exynos S7. :( And that's what Canada's going to get.Here's hoping they can improve things via software updates. Was considering the S9 to replace the wife's now dead S6. She's been using my S7 for the past two months while I limp along with a cracked-screen Note4. Other than the camera and screen, this isn't looking like much or an upgrade for being two generations newer.
Maybe we'll give the ZTE, Huawei, and Xiaomi phones another look ...
mlauzon76 - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Samsung Exynos 9810 (Europe & Rest of World)Canada is the 'rest of [the] world', but we don't get that version, we never get anything with the Exynos processor, we get the following one:
Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 (US, China, Japan)
phoenix_rizzen - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
S6 and S7 in Canada are the Exynos version. We have both in our home (well, the S6 is dead now).madseven7 - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Since when? Canada has always been Snapdragon. Check againphoenix_rizzen - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
Since the S6 and the S7.The S4 and Note4 (only other Samsung offices we've had) were Qualcomm, but the Galaxy S6 and S7 were Exynos.
Samsung Galaxy S6 SM-G920W8
Samsung Galaxy S7 SM-G930W8
Phonemore.com and XDA lists them both as Exynos. And when I check About on the phone in my hand, that's what it shows as well.
Based on that trend, I figured we'd be getting the Exynos versions of future Galaxy phones in Canada.
phoenix_rizzen - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
Looks like for the S8 and the S9 they've switched back to Qualcomm for Canada.SM-950W (S8)
SM-965W (S9)
Raqia - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Thanks for the excellent in depth report. I think you're being a bit unfair to the cache architecture of the S845: adding any cache at all will add latency when accessing DRAM instead of having none at all. There are use cases where additional cache is useful, and although any accesses that spill over into DRAM pay a penalty, anything prior to that sees quite a benefit.Is that much of the performance deficit of the 9810 in the "System Performance" in every test attributable to DVFS? Surely the Javascript related benchmarks like Speedometer and WebXPRT are running full tilt without so many UI calls?
jospoortvliet - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Sure but if the CPU takes half a sec to get up to speed the bench that takes a second for each part is as ruined as is real life performance...Wardrive86 - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Interesting that the Adreno 630's sustained performance is close to the Mali's peak performance in many of those benchmarks. Also Are Adreno 500 series gpus 64 ALU per core?iamjekk - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
Well written article as always. Excellent job! Keep it up!lopri - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
On the SPEC page;"One thing to note as interesting is the difference in scaling on the Exynos 9810 and Snapdragon 845 between both integer and floating point average power. Samsung’s power only increases 8% for floating point while Qualcomm/ARM’s solution sees a larger 30% jump. I don’t know if this points out to more efficient floating point execution engines on Samsung’s part or if ARM has the more efficient integer core."
I have no clue where these numbers come from looking at the tables.
tuxRoller - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
The first table after the fp results (or, equivalently, the table following that paragraph).Ratio of fp to int for each respective SoC.
djayjp - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
NAND performance?djayjp - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
nvm. Hope to see that update!Lau_Tech - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link
An interesting read with an objective treatment of the s9 pros and cons ! Thank you very much Andrei!Diggamata - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Thanks for the highly insightful and detailed analysis of the SoCs, AnandTech never dissapoints!Looks like mobile SoCs aren't really limited by area anymore especially with screens getting bigger, they got more room to flex. But what in the hell does it take ARM 24.53mm2 only to be slower in peak performance than Qualcomm's 11.69mm2? It might be how their SIMDs are only 4-wide compared to the traditional 32 (Nvidia) or 64 (AMD and Qualcomm) which requires a lot more control logic. Although ARM's architecture seems not that far behind in efficiency just more conservative in their clocks so they could actually go to 5w and match upto Qualcomm's peak performance in GFXBench 3.1 offscreen.
Would be nice to get some more info on the sustained performance metric. A graph-plot of FPS over time would've been the best way to show this in action. I feel the sustained performance is more of a DVFS characteristic than SoC efficiency so it would be nice to see how they adjust clock-frequencies relative to load and thermals.
jjj - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
How is power at idle and/or A55 load for Exynos vs SD845? The gap in battery life is likely way too large to be only about the big cores, unless the testing methodology is flawed in a big way.Steveh20 - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
I just read an article about how the price of the iPhone may have been to much for some, I read the whole article and there was not 1 mention of Samsung, I said to myself.. " they can do an iPhone article with out mentioning Samsung but they can't do a Samsung article with out mentioning Apple" sure enough this was the next article I clicked on and boom.. in the first paragraph there is a apple mention.. I stopped reading after I saw the word apple..jospoortvliet - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Any iPhone X review would mention Samsung I am sure if only because they manufacture the screen... but a pure price arti ce can easily talk about Android in general. Anyway you missed the best galaxy S9 review on the web.N Zaljov - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Although I can somehow relate to your point of view, ignoring Apple in an article that is mainly focused on actual user experience and real life orientated workloads would be the dickmove #1 due to the fact that - even after all these years - Apple still generally makes devices that are among the best when it comes to real life use cases and responsiveness.Devices like the Pixel phones with their heavily tuned EAS scheduler and optimized components (both hard- and software) are actually pretty much equal to Apple‘s counterparts, but their marketshare is...well...kind of underwhelming IMHO. The fact that Google can optimize their devices without any control over the „main“ silicon, whereas Samsung totally sucks in this regard, even though they could do a full stack optimization, is really interesting, but staggering at the same time.
In any case: You should seriously consider reading the article, it‘s pretty much the best out there.
name99 - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Uh, dude, did you even fscking look at a relevant article?The iPhone 7 review is here:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10685/the-iphone-7-...
Let's see.
Pg1 says Samsung is Apple's biggest competitor.
Pg2 talks about Samsung's screens
Pg3 has Samsung devices in the benchmark tables
Likewise for battery life.
Likewise for camera performance.
Seriously, what more do you expect?
NeatOman - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Really interesting looking at the 845 benchmarks, now I just need to wait for a phone i like to have the same chipset ;-PLooking at you Pixel 3.. maybe One+ 6 if it has a full RGB OLED (2160x1080).
peevee - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
Essential 2?Given small real-life difference between 845 and 835, Essential PH-1 is still a great device. And very appropriately priced. Nothing to wait there.
StrangerGuy - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
All the S9 did was made me appreciate my S8+ more, of which I only bought because of generous employer benefits. Without which I wouldn't even have cared about these overpriced flagships.Valantar - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
I pointed this out in your S9 launch article, and apparently I have to make my point again: neither light nor depth of field is the reason for the aperture change - it's purely to combat distortions and lack of sharpness in the image due to the combination of a large aperture and tiny, tiny glass.Why? When it comes to depth of field, one needs to factor in not only the aperture, but also the crop factor (sensor size relative to standard 35mm film). As such, f/1.5 on a standard cell phone 1/2.3" sensor is roughly equal to f/8.4 on a 35mm sensor, or f/5.6 on an APS-C sensor. This is one of the main photographic advantages of large-sensor cameras: that you can get shallow depth of field with lenses that are actually possible to manufacture.
An example: https://dofsimulator.net/en/?x=EAyAeuF3AAAIJEwkAAA...
As you can see here, with a 1/2.3" f/1.5 sensor, focusing on a subject 3m away gives you an in-focus area of ~43m - this is NOT too little, not by any measure. Moving the subject to 5m gives you effectively infinite focus, with everything from 1.9 to infinity being in the focal plane. You'd need your subject at less than .5 meters for DoF to be an issue - which it would be with most cameras at that distance.
On the other hand, it's well known that for large apertures, anything but the best glass will lead to aberrations and distortions in the image, and a general loss of sharpness across the frame. Look at even a single DSLR lens review - they're _always_ sharper when stopped down. With a lens stack this tiny, there's no feasible way to control this - it's likely physically impossible to avoid aberrations and distortions at an aperture number like this. Hence, the variable aperture.
Now, AT is usually very accurate in their reporting. Could you PLEASE correct this? Pretty please? Since you claim to be doing a deep-dive into the camera, this is not a good look.
Valantar - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
To clarify: You say that "The F/2.4 aperture in day-light shots is not a gimmick and very much an advantage to the S9 as its deeper depth of field is noticeable in shots, producing sharper images than the F/1.5 aperture." This is a misunderstood conclusion. The added sharpness is largely not due to a deeper depth of field, but rather due to the stopped-down aperture resulting in a generally sharper image. This conflates two different characteristics, focus depth and lens/optical sharpness. These are not the same. If you did a more rigorous test where both cameras focused on the same spot (ideally not in the centre of the image) in a scene with sufficient depth, or conversely shot against a flat target with a lot of detail, you'd likely see this pretty clearly, as _even the focal point_ would be sharper at f/2.4. If this was due to depth of field, both settings would be equally sharp at the focus point, while what you're saying here is that f/2.4 is sharper _across the image_. That's a typical effect of a smaller aperture improving sharpness, not of the smaller aperture restricting DoF.peevee - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
" _even the focal point_ would be sharper at f/2.4"If it is the center, it might not be so because with such tiny sensor, at f/2.4 maximum resolution is diffraction-limited. Need the exact size of the sensor to confirm, but I am almost sure than even at f/1.5 Airy disk is bigger than a pixel.
Takethis - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Any chance they Samsung could fix their “slow-and-steady” DVFS approach with software updates? Given the actual state of things, Snapdragon 845 phones are the one to buy this year (I'm thinking Oneplus 6)Ankurg - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
With due respect to the author and the site, I have to believe that most of the extensive tests and their results will not affect the avg day-to-day usage of this device.I am already seeing the panic this review has created on reddit, with many people now re-thinking whether to purchase or not...
Yes, most youtube/site reviewers don't go as deep as this, but a problem so steep would have been felt.
I would advice my fellow mates here not to lose sight of the fact that this is the best android phone you can buy right now.....irrespective of the choice of chip.
SirCanealot - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
"With due respect to the author and the site, I have to believe that most of the extensive tests and their results will not affect the avg day-to-day usage of this device."While I'm happy to have a super-fast phone with crappy battery life, I'm not happy to have an average-speed phone with crappy battery life. IE, I have a Exynos Note 4 which is fast with crappy battery life and it still does the job...
The crappy battery life is going to effect every single user and every one of your friends in America is going to get a better performing phone with better battery life. Day-to-day I'm getting worse performance and battery life; this means I can re-consider my options now I have all the data.
Why shouldn't this review make you reconsider? That's what it's meant to do. Unless you're a Samsung shareholder, I wouldn't pay any attention to this completely normal thing of human society...
id4andrei - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
The author himself stated that you will not see any difference as an ordinary consumer. Some slight circumstantial scrolling stutters are all he noticed.Still the Exynos underperforms relative to its advances in chip design.
peevee - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
"The author himself stated that you will not see any difference as an ordinary consumer."Nope. The fast core only winding up after 0.4s is VERY noticeable as good phones will already finish launching an app or rendering a local HTML in Webview by this time, some time ago.
madnav - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - link
This review is not really meant to serve as a comparison between other android phones. This review (or rather analysis) is to show how each SOC OEM has progressed over years; and how the actual implementation in products turn out.Some of us appreciate this level of technological attention to underlying details; irrespective of whether the information affects end user or not.
For "avg day-to-day usage" i think no one really needs to spend on devices above $200 today. A person spending top money will want to know that the product was built with top quality and latest technology feasible; and that is exactly what analysis like this brings to its readers.
Kehboz 2943 - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
I Just upgraded from a Droid turbo 2 to a Google pixel 2 XL I compared it to the S9+ when I asked the salesman what he used he said he liked the pixel 2 XL over the S9+ and he said the pixel 2 XL was cheeper in price my carrier is Verizon I've never owned a Samsung anything so I just took the salesmans word for it I can't tell if I made the right choice. If anyone has compared the two or would like to comment I welcome the feedbacklilmoe - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
It's been a while since we got a PRO review. Thank you very much Andrei, best stuff as usual.Anyway, yes, best phone with best features. I'll recommend the device to family and friends, but I won't touch it myself. I knew this won't be changing in production units, but I'm totally disappointed in the default scheduler settings. Samsung is losing a LOT of PR with how much they're holding back this monster version of Exynos. No, feature and performance parity with Snapdragon is NOT acceptable. I thought they'd stop being too damn conservative with ramping up clocks. This is totally unacceptable from an enthusiast perspective. I also thought they'd be upgrading the UFS Nand storage, not the case, also disappointing.
Sigh.... Oh well. Until when, Samsung???
tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Perf parity? If they were aiming for that they did a piss poor job.madnav - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
@Andrei FrumusanuCan this article be updated with the details of the FW that S9 and S9+ were running? (FW and date/month of FW)
It will help readers track how long it actually takes Samsung to fix the scheduler.
julandorid - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
What is the reason for comparing the smaller model S9 Exynos with the bigger brother S9 Plus Snapdragon?In my opinion there are too many differences for this years models that can cause 5-10% difference or even more just because of the different performance plans, scheduler, thermals and thus the whole performance behavior, not to mention the extra 2GB that also could affect the overall performance between S9 and S9+ and thus Exynos in S9 and SD in S9+.
phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Because that's what they were given by Samsung or able to source locally? It's mentioned right in the article that they tried to get the same SoC version in each size but were unable to.ctchb - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Can you compare the camera image quality and speed of snapdragon vs exynos? Their ISPs are different, and this is a big factor of camera performance.nedooo - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Amazing review, more like scientific analysis.I am surprised to see Snapdragon 845 bases its power advantages over 835 is "smoke and mirrors" short unsustainable bursts. But maybe "always on" laptops will fully utilize its power...
warrenk81 - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Great to see AT going back at flagship devices. Could you compile all those benchmarky bits of the 2017 devices into a recap or something? Apple and Google both shipped big new things in 2017 that guys just ignored.Matt Humrick - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Those devices were not deliberately ignored; there was a gap between when I left and when Andrei started where AT did not have a dedicated mobile editor. This is also the reason why there is no iPhone 8/X review.hybrid2d4x4 - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Andrei, thanks for your recognition of the 3.5mm jack and calling out the trend of its removal as the anti-consumer move it is.huan01 - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
It seems like the poor CPU performance in the PCMARK and real life usage is due to the conservative tuning of DVFS and scheduler instead of poorly designed hardware architecture. I wonder if this is a result of the normalization done between Exynos / Snapdragon to offset the differing architecture? I hope not, if it is the case then there would not be "future patch" to update the tuning of DVFS and scheduler. What do you guys think?Deleco - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
lpddr4x or lpddr4 for the RAMzodiacfml - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Coming in late for the comments but I haven't seen update regarding the Exynos performance here. Your results are unlikely.tuxRoller - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
The article went up two days ago. At the time, two days ago (give or take a few days), I doubt the results are unlikely.Do you have a link to another set of benchmark results (using the same benchmarking methodology, of course)?
N Zaljov - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
The benchmark course was done with an Exynos S9 running the latest software (Andrei confirmed it), and since there hasn‘t been an update so far, I highly doubt that the results are „unlikely“.Maybe they‘ll try to alter the scheduler & governor bias with future updates, but only Samsung really knows...
Quantumz0d - Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - link
Fantastic work. Pleasure to read every bit of it. Great deal of work was put into this. Much respect.Thank you Andrei, Keep it up !!
AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, March 29, 2018 - link
Too bad they had to ruin the S9 by making it so damn big.Monty1401 - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
How terminal is the poor battery life of the exynos, can software updates theoretically fix it? I bought one last week and wasn't particularly impressed by the battery life then came across this article - i have a 28 day cooling off period to return the device if needed. To me power leakage/ hotplugging seems a pretty terminal issue that can't be addressed with software updates?Javert89 - Saturday, March 31, 2018 - link
I think there are two feasible ways to improve battery life: downclock the chip to SD845 or even SD835 peak performance level and "free up" the current scheduler from conservativeness; or implement a much more advanced scheduler to improve both performance over short bursts and battery life over long term. I think the new DynamIQ system could make more advanced scheduling possible; I have in mind the old Krait architecture where each core had a different frequency; but in Exynos 9810 each core of the big cluster has apparently the same frequency, according to CPU-Z on Youtube videos ..... In the short term, a downclock is the most feasible solution; in the long term, assuming they will insist with 6-wide decoders big cores, they will need to implement the more advanced schedulerMonty1401 - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - link
Thanks for the response - I'm loathed to root/ flash a kernel to a brand new device just for the sake of slowing it down and I doubt that Samsung will address the issue before my deadline for returning the handset. It's a very big £850 gamble to hold onto it & hope they fix it - will probably return the device and see if they solve the issue (they must surely come up with a fix before they release the Note with the same SOC!?) or be forced to accept a worse screen on the oneplus/ pixel handsets. :(yhselp - Friday, March 30, 2018 - link
A bit late to the party, sorry, but I'd like to ask a question: while it's obviously better to have a 3.5 mm headphone jack, is it not true that getting rid of the jack itself and accompanying electronics, DAC, etc. frees up space and saves weight? Apple seems to have benefited in terms of weight going from the iPhone 6s to the 7 because of the removal of the headphone jack.Oyeve - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
I highly doubt the jack and accompanying electronics would make a noticeable difference in weight.ZeDestructor - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
Looking at other phones of similar volume but without a 3.5mm jack (like the Huawei P20 Pro and Razer phone), it looks like you get more battery for the loss of your 3.5mm jack (to the tune of ~500mAh)bogda - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - link
Removing headphone jack from iPhone has nothing to do with increase a battery size in iPhone 7. Check any teardown of iPhone 7 on internet and it will be crystal clear.This guy added headphone jack himself to iPhone 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA
Check Jerry's thoughts on this matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTSN4zWeQ0
bogda - Monday, April 2, 2018 - link
I love your comment about headphone jack, and specially the stress you put on it in closing thoughts.I can understand reasoning why Apple erased their headphone jack. They are going to sell millions of their trendy wireless Earpods. Their customers obviously do not care.
But even smallest Android manufacturers are kicking out headphone jack in their top models. It is pure ignorance and bad reasoning in my opinion. Hardly any of them will sell significant number of "their" wireless headphones and will lose some customers because of that.
If I buy flagship device I want more features, not fewer. All those "trendy" Android phone makers have definitely lost me as a customer.
madnav - Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - link
As a user of both S8 and S8+ running Exynos 8895, I can tell from my observation that both devices performed slightly differently despite of being very similar. One seemed tuned for battery endurance while the other seems tuned for swift performance.It is my humble request to update the review with differences (or lack of) if AnandTech manages to test Exynos S9+ as well.
NotcyNews - Wednesday, April 4, 2018 - link
Interesting news.Samsung remain my favorite phone.Anirudhsarma - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
What happens if use the settings option to lower the clock speed of the processor does this help battery liferobertkoa - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
Yes. Has a great built in battery monitor that puts apps to sleep but they become immediately available.Also Location OFF unless using GPS ...Avoid having Apps and Sites give you notifications.
Avoid unnecessary extra tabs opened.
Screen brightness at 30% indoors.
I squeeze a lot of SOT on 4GLTE 6 hours browsing 40 minutes of calls 40 minutes of Youtube 20 minutes of emails on a charge.
Have not used Camera for a long time yet.
8 to 9 hours SOT.Qualcomm S9 USA not sure what people are doing who get half this.
I AM afraid to download the new .75GIG software update...why do they need .75GIG for security patches...?
Larger Operating System with constant security in deep background APPS could kill my battery life ...
peevee - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
WOW, A55 cores are so tiny compared to M3, one M3 cores takes as much silicon as 8 A55 cores. In the same amount of silicon, they could have had 1 M3 core and ~28-30 A55s. It would be just as fast in single-thread tasks but much faster AND more energy-efficient in multi-thread ones.peevee - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Do I see it correctly that good old 820 is both most efficient and one of the fastest in most cases? Such a degradation!peevee - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
"we see the Snapdragon 845 within spitting distance of the Snapdragon 835’s energy usage throughout most of the workloads, sometimes winning and sometimes losing"Where 845 is winning in energy usage? What are you talking about? Either something is wrong with your graphs (color coding?), or 820 is significantly better than 835 which is significantly better than 845.
mkstowegnv - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Thank you for putting all the work into this valuable review. But. You did not talk about GNSS - GPS, GLONASS, etc. (and AT has not had a story involving GNSS for 5 years). You can only do so much and it is another world of expertise, but it would be particularly valuable to look into GNSS for this phone. 2018 was supposed to be the year of phones with multifrequency GNSS leading to centimeter accuracy (and more to the point for the average user much better and faster performance in urban canyons, thick forests and other unfavorable environments and times). Broadcomm's BCM4775x series of L1, L5 chips was going to make this happen (but they have remained mum about which phones would use the chip). The problem is that Qualcomm SOCs are unlikely to incorporate their archrival's products, and all the leaks and previews of all the flagship phones for the next year indicate Qualcomm Snapdragon SOCs. Huawei uses non-Qualcomm but their just released p20 uses the previous generation, L1-only Broadcom chip. The only BCM4775x phone that anyone has seen and maybe the only one for the forseeable near future is the Exynos version of the S9+ which Techinsight's teardown and XDA hackers confirm has the BCM54772. It was not announced or documented by Samsung, and XDAers still don't know if it is picking up the L5 signal in an accessible way. What heroic figure(s) could possibly measure and compare GNSS accuracy in recent phones and possibly hack the Exynos S9+ to use L1 and L5 and get the best accuracy?KD323 - Thursday, May 17, 2018 - link
Thanks for the writeup! By the way, what do you think of these wooden phone cases for S9/S9 Plus?https://kaloadesigns.com/collections/galaxy-s9Peaches - Sunday, May 27, 2018 - link
Does these tests mean, that The E9810 with The CPU-Limiter from The Power Saving Mode activated , is as fast and more efficient than The E8895? BTW:awesome test and i love Hose detailed and fact-based you are.Taleim - Wednesday, May 30, 2018 - link
I hear that the may update improves battery life, any chance of running the tests again? CheersLodestone - Thursday, August 30, 2018 - link
Same here. Would greatly appreciate if you could run the exynos battery tests again to see if updates have improved the problem.CyberRain - Wednesday, August 8, 2018 - link
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