Opinion | Samsung refutes reports of performance disparities between the Exynos 990 and Snapdragon 865

Over the past few weeks, it's been revealed that the Exynos 990 Samsung uses on the Galaxy S20 in most parts of the world is, well, a tad deficient when compared to the competition. Those findings have sparked media outcry against the company, culminating in the creation of a petition "Stop selling us inferior Exynos phones!" which currently has 34,000 signatures. Samsung, however, is refuting the whole thing.

The company reportedly had this to say:

Ergo, scientific findings showing the Exynos 990 to be considerably worse than the Snapdragon 865 in most metrics are false. Samsung's evidence? None, of course. You have to take the company's word for it. 

Benchmarks have shown the Exynos 990 to be less efficient than the Snapdragon 865 and even last year's Snapdragon 855. We also published a report on a gaming video that shows the Exynos 990-powered Galaxy S20 to throttle hard and perform worse than a Snapdragon 855-powered Galaxy S10. Our own review pointed out significant throttling issues with the Exynos model of the Galaxy S20, too:

Unlike its predecessor, the Galaxy S20 warmed up significantly with a case temperature of up to 46.7 °C (116 °F) after a long period of high load. This became particularly unpleasant when putting the smartphone back into your pocket after playing a game for some time.

We run the GFXBench battery test in order to determine a smartphone’s thermal throttling characteristics under sustained load...the first drop in performance came after only 5 runs (20%) with the second following after 12 iterations (40%) and the third after 21 iterations, at which point no more than a third of the device’s initial performance is still available. For gamers, this is a significant decrease and major restriction.

Of course, Samsung says the S20 offers equal performance, regardless of it being powered by a Snapdragon 865 or an Exynos 990, and we all know big corporations always tell the truth.