Samsung has returned to using inhouse designed Exynos chips in S24 models after addressing long-running complaints that saw customers petition the company.
For years Galaxy S series smartphones used either a Snapdragon processor made by Californian headquartered semiconductor manufacturer Qualcomm, or ARM-based Exynos processors developed by Samsung itself. Which one you got depended on the country of purchase.
While both are fast processors, there are some differences. Qualcomm Snapdragon processors are used extensively in Android devices and known for their strong performance and power efficiency. Exynos processors are suited to AI applications but are not quite as power efficient, according to reports.
That was the case until a couple of years ago when Samsung was receiving a mounting number of complaints about Exynos chipsets in Galaxy S series phones.
9to5google.com, in a write-up of the saga, said the complaints centred on heat, cellular signal, and/or random software problems on Galaxy S phones with Exynos chipsets.
By 2020, Samsung users were irate. They signed a petition on Change.org imploring the company to discontinue using Exynos chipsets in Galaxy devices.
“Exynos phones are shown to perform slower, have worse battery life, use inferior camera hardware and processing, overheat and throttle faster, amongst other issues,” the petition read.
“We’ve had to accept this over many years and many different iterations of their phones. Every year we’ve hoped for Samsung to either give us the same device or make their own parts perform on par with the competition. They have failed to deliver on these requests over and over again.”
An update to the petition early in 2023 congratulated Samsung on switching to Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in all S23 models across the world.
However as 9to5google.com notes, this year in 2014, Exynos is back. It’s in the S24 and S24+ models in all regions outside of the US and Canada. That includes Australia.
The exception is the S24 Ultra which uses a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor globally.
“In a media briefing, Samsung explained that switching to Exynos allowed for ‘a complete supply chain to bring these devices around the globe’, the website said.
It will be interesting to see if the petitioners on Change.Org are happy with this switch-back.
The four-nanometer Exynos 2400 is a complex chipset with four different cores – one at 3.2GHz, two at 2.90GHz, three at 2.6GHz and four power efficient cores at 2.0 GHz.
Samsung says this 10-core chipsets offers a 1.7x increase in CPU performance, and a 14.7x boost in AI processing compared to its two year old predecessor, Exynos 2200.
The big boost in AI performance should aid the real time translation features made available with the Galaxy S24 models.
And the chip’s GPU should improve support for mobile ray tracking, rendering and reflections.
