Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ / 855 Plus vs Samsung Exynos 9820

Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ / 855 Plus

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus (855+) Mobile Platform is a high-end smartphone and tablet SoC that Qualcomm announced in 2019. Compared to the normal Snapdragon 855, the 855 Plus offers higher clock speeds of the GPU and CPU. The SoC integrates a fast ‘Prime Core’ that clocks up to 2.96 GHz (up from 2.84 GHz in the 855) and three further fast ARM Cortex-A76 performance cores, which can reach up to 2.42 GHz. These are complemented by four power-saving ARM Cortex-A55 cores that clock up to a maximum of 1.8 GHz.

The SoC also integrates the new X24 LTE modem that Qualcomm promises will deliver up to 2 Gbit/s maximum download speed over LTE Cat.20 and up to 316 Mbit/s upload speeds. The Snapdragon 855 can be configured with the company’s new X50 5G modem too.

Qualcomm has also improved the integrated Wi-Fi modem, which is Wi-Fi 6-ready, has 8x8 Sounding and supports up to 802.11 ay Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi modem can utilise the 60 GHz mmWave band for up to 10 Gbit/s internet speeds.

The Hexagon 690 DSP has undergone the most revisions of that which Qualcomm has integrated into the Snapdragon 855. The new DSP incorporates a neural processing unit (NPU) with dedicated Tensor-cores that can execute up to 7 trillion operations per second in conjunction with the CPU and GPU. In short, the Snapdragon 855 should be three times faster than the Snapdragon 845 and two times faster than the Kirin 980 SoC.

The Snapdragon 855 also has a Spectra 380 ISP onboard, which is the world’s first chip to incorporate a Computer Vision Engine (CV-ISP) that can perform depth calculations in videos at up to 60 FPS. The Snapdragon 855 should deliver real-time portrait modes or be able to detect objects with relatively low power consumption.

The built-in memory controller supports up to 16 GB LPDDR4x RAM (4 x 16-bit). As the SD855, the 855+ integrates an Adreno 640 graphics card that is now higher clocked and should offer a 15% higher performance.

Qualcomm will manufacturer the Snapdragon 855+ at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) using a 7 nm FinFET process. 

Samsung Exynos 9820

The Samsung Exynos 9 9820 is a mobile SoC for smartphones and tablets. It was announced late 2018 and was first integrated in the Samsung Galaxy S10 smartphones early 2019. The SoC integrates three clusters of processor cores with different architectures. Two big Samsung custom M4 cores clock up to 2.7 GHz and deliver peak performance. Two additional ARM Cortex-A75 are also for performance tasks and clock at up to 2.3 GHz. Finally, four small and power efficient ARM-Cortex A55 cores clock at up to 1.9 GHz are in the third cluster. The different clusters can run simultaneously thanks to DinamIQ.

The integrated LTE modem supports LTE-Advanced Pro Cat.20 (8CA 2 Gbps download, 3CA 316 Mbps upload). The integrated graphics card is a ARM Mali G76MP12 with 12 cores.

The performance of the CPU part is positioned in the high end segment for smartphone processors. The single core performance is, thanks to the big custom cores, a strong suit of the CPU and reaches the levels of Apples mobile SoCs. The direct competitor Snapdragon 855 can be left behind in single-core benchmarks like Geekbench and operates on par in multi-core benchmarks. The predecessor Exynos 9810 can be bested by around 17% in our first benchmarks with the Galaxy S10 Plus.

The SoC is produced at Samsung in the new 8nm LPP process that should also help with some of the performance gains.