Benchmarks show the Exynos 990 on the Galaxy S20 phones to be considerably worse than the Snapdragon 865

Samsung released the Galaxy S20 phones a few weeks ago. As is customary, the phones shipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 in North America and a few other regions, with the rest of the world having to make do with Samsung's in-house Exynos 990. As is also customary, the Exynos 990 also looks to perform quite worse than the Snapdragon 865.

This isn't news, really. Benchmarks from before the Galaxy S20 phones were released showed the Exynos 990-powered models lagging behind the Snapdragon 865 ones on Geekbench. Raw performance isn't all that matters, thankfully; efficiency is just as important. Sadly, however, the Exynos 990 also appears to be a lot less efficient.

Apparently, the Exynos 990 only manages to deliver a peak performance to power ratio of roughly 13.0/W on SPECint. In comparison, the Snapdragon 865 records a value in the region of 19.6/W. Last year's Snapdragon 855 is also more efficient than the Exynos 990, as it pushes on with a ratio of about 15/W. 

Samsung's Exynos SoCs have failed to live up to expectations over the past few years, and the Exynos 990 appears to be a continuation of that trend. Thankfully, Samsung appears to have taken note of the prevalent issues. The Exynos 990 will likely be the last SoC to feature the company's custom Mongoose cores, and the South Korean company looks to be set to make some major changes to its silicon-making department.

We're yet to review the Galaxy S20, though, so you'd best stay tuned for our take on the performance of the Exynos S20.