Samsung Exynos: Performance problems not only in the high end

Fortunately, Samsung is not affected by any trade disputes with the USA and is free to choose from the product range of suppliers who use American technology.

As a result, the Koreans can easily obtain chips from the American manufacturer Qualcomm, and these are actually also built into Samsung smartphones from time to time, but global markets are not treated equally here.

In this way, there has been controversy for years about Samsung delivering its top-of-the-line smartphones with Exynos processors in Europe, for example, while Qualcomm SoCs are installed in South Korea, for instance. Benchmarks as well as our tests regularly confirm that European users are, therefore, receiving less performance and sometimes other problems such as high energy consumption.

We have just tested a mid-range smartphone from Samsung, the Samsung Galaxy M31s, and Samsung has naturally installed its own SoC here too, the Exynos 9611. And this shows that the problems don't only exist in the high-end segment, but that Samsung's SoCs can't compete with Qualcomm chips in the mid-range segment either.

Maybe performance differences in the mid-range aren't as dramatic as when you spend four times as much money on a high-end smartphone. Still, it's annoying that Samsung didn't allow the Galaxy M31s to have a more powerful SoC.

The smartphone offers a very large battery and consequently long runtimes; it also has a color-accurate AMOLED display, so there are definitely some highlights for around 300 Euros (~$356).

The detailed benchmark results, which also show how big the differences between Exynos and Snapdragon are, can be found in our extensive review of the Samsung Galaxy M31s.