The Note9’s been has been out for several months now, but unfortunately we never really did get to reviewing the phone. A big question from a lot of our community members that kept coming up is whether we’d redo testing of the Snapdragon vs Exynos models of the Note9, and see if there would be any major differences between these phones and the results we got earlier in the year on the Galaxy S9s.

While it took a while, I’ve finally got my hands on both variants of the Note9, and we can finally deliver on the results of our testing. This piece isn’t a full review of the phone itself; here there’s really no doubt about Samsung’s overall quality of the phone as the Note9 continues the excellent results of the Galaxy S9 in categories such as design, build quality, display as well cameras. For camera results I’ll refer to my more recent device articles such as the Pixel 3 or Mate 20s review where the Note9 is included.

We’ve covered the key aspects of the Note9 in our release article. This year, the two most notable features of the Note9 are the inclusion of a new bigger battery, coming in at 4000mAh as well as an increased maximum storage capacity of 512GB.

The new S-Pen also has gained wireless connectivity which allows it to control various configurable features on the phone. The new feature means that the S-Pen is no longer a passive component, but rather a powered one. Samsung implemented this in a very interesting way: the S-Pen now draws its power from a capacitor instead of a regular battery. What this allows the phone to do is charge the new pen in seconds when docked into the device, rather than the more extended charging times that are required for lithium batteries.

I could go on about the specifications here, but really the point of this article and what the majority of readers are interested in are the differences in internal hardware:

As in the Galaxy S9s, the Note9 is again dual-sourcing the SoC from Qualcomm as well as S.LSI. This has been a big discussion topic for me this year with our coverage of the disappointing results of the Exynos 9810 variant of the Galaxy S9. While over the last few years we’ve been used to seeing differences between the SoC variants, they’ve never been as great as this generation. We’ve extensively explained as to why this happened in our review of the Galaxy S9 as well as follow-up articles centring on the 9810’s software.

One big critique of the results back then was that I only had a smaller Exynos S9 versus the bigger Snapdragon S9+, somewhat blurring the differences to some people. Today’s results Note9 results are on the same device model, so hopefully comparisons will be more straightforward.

Battery life – Improved at a cost

Before we get to the more detailed talk of what has actually changes for the Exynos in the Note9, let’s just jump to the most critical results: battery life. On the Galaxy S9s, the Snapdragon variant was always consistently higher. Let’s see how the Note9 fares:

In our web browsing battery test, the Snapdragon and Exynos Note9 surprisingly end up within margins of each other. In absolute terms, both units showcase outstanding results just shy of 12 hours, only really being beaten by our more recent result of the Mate 20.

This is an excellent improvement over the results of the Exynos S9 back at release. In my piece altering the S9’s kernel and scheduler, I showcased that performance as well as battery life could be improved just by altering the behaviour of the software. The one thing that made the greatest improvements in both aspects was the removal of the 2.7GHz boost of the big cores.

Over the summer following that article I had made some further improvements software wise, as well did some digging into the battery of the S9: For some reason, Exynos S9’s are shipping exclusively with a battery model “EB-BG960ABE” while the Snapdragon variants all exclusively were shipping with “EB-BG960ABA” batteries. The two models come from different factories. There was one discrepancy that bothered me here: the fuel-gauge on the small Exynos S9’s were consistently showing smaller nominal capacities than the Snapdragon S9’s while both have the same charger and fuel gauge IC. I ended up ordering a fresh set of both battery models and replaced them in my S9 unit, and skipping over a lot of technical details about how the fuel-gauges work, the end result is that the ABA models do seem to have a 5% better longevity over the ABE models.

Overall I managed to raise the battery results of the S9 in our web test from 6.8h up to ~8.8h all while improving performance. The Exynos Note9’s 11.66h here represents a 32% increase – something quite in line with the 4000mAh vs 3000mAh difference of the two phones, barring of course software differences and the fact that the Note9 has a much bigger screen.

Do keep these results in mind while we talk about performance on the next page.

In PCMark, the Snapdragon Note 9 retains a notable lead in battery life, with the Exynos Note9 coming in at 15% behind it. Again the Exynos Note9 fares 32% better than the small Exynos S9 on stock firmware, in line with the battery capacity difference but not in line with the screen size differences of both devices.

At first glance, it seems that Samsung has largely resolved the battery differences between the Snadpragon 845 and Exynos 9810 units of the Note9. However as I’ve hinted at several times now, things aren’t quite as straightforward as to what it cost to achieve this. Next up we’ll investigate the system performance of both Note9s.

System Performance - Still a large(r) contrast

The performance difference between the Snapdragon and Exynos S9’s was among by biggest complaints about the latter variant. Here there’s a stark difference in software quality between what Qualcomm and S.LSI were able to deliver. Let’s see if the Note9 improves this in any way:

The Exynos Note9 here unfortunately doesn’t really improve on the S9, and even shows a slight regression.

The video editing test further showcases the same behaviour, with the Snapdragon Note9 being in line with the S9+ result, while the Exynos Note9 is in line with the S9 result.

The writing test of PCMark is in my opinion one of the most important tests in our suite, as its results pretty much directly correspond to the actual perceived speed of a device in a lot of every-day scenarios. The test makes heavy usage of common Android APIs to achieve representative usage of common tasks such as text editing and PDF rendering.

The Exynos Note9 here seems again to showcase a slight performance degradation over the S9, but it’s all within margins of error.

The photo editing test consists of small bursts of workloads making use of Android’s image processing APIs. This test’s key feature is that it is very sensitive to the responsiveness of the system, in other words, how fast the SoC can ramp up its performance.

Finally, the data manipulation test is the most telling one in terms of the differences that Samsung has made on the Exynos model: Here the Note9 performs significantly worse than the Exynos Galaxy S9, coming in with a 34% lower score.

The data manipulation test is characteristic in the way it works in that it has a significant portion of heavy single-threaded processing. What’s actually happening on the Exynos Note9 here is that Samsung is disallowing the SoC to boost to its single-core 2.7GHz mode as often as the S9 originally did, a regression that I also encountered with my custom kernels on the S9.

In terms of overall result, the Exynos Note9 falls in the ranks by several spots, now scoring even lower than last year’s Exynos 8895 S8, a not too fantastic showing.

Web browsing: less 2.7GHz – more actual performance?

The most evident result of the more prohibitive single-core booster is in the web browsing tests:

Both in Speedometer 2.0 and WebXPRT 3, the Exynos Note9 performs better than the S9 with its initial firmware. The result here is directly related to the decreased result of the data manipulation score in PCMark. As explained in our scheduler pieces, one of the reasons the Exynos S9 fared so badly in these tests is the core booster mechanism; boosting to 2.7GHz on a single big core while relegating all other threads to the small cores results in worse performance than simply if there were simply more big cores available, but at a lower clock speed. The latter scenario is what happens on the Note9 as why we see a 10% improvement over the S9.

The most low-effort band-aid

Overall, the actual changes in behaviour of the Exynos chipset in the Note9 represent nothing more than the most low effort changes possible. What Samsung has done here is just slightly change the booster mechanism in order make workloads more difficult to trigger the single-core 2.7GHz boost mode. For performance this is both beneficial as well as a regression, depending on workloads. What is more important is that the severe battery life impact of the 2.7GHz frequency is more significantly reduced through these changes, even though efficiency still doesn't match the Snapdragon 845 variant.

While performance has increased in the web benchmarks by around 10% - the overall result is still abysmal. Comparing the speed of the Snapdragon Note9 to the Exynos Note9 in just everyday usage, the Exynos still pretty much falls behind in every aspect. Samsung had a chance to improve things more drastically with the release of the new phone, but to me it just looks like another disappointment.

The Snapdragon Note9 is pretty much in line with other S845 devices: performance is a non-issue. While there are now more contrasting devices out there such as Huawei’s Mate 20’s – the Snapdragon Note9 is still a great device to use when it comes to its performance.

GPU Performance & Device Thermals

GPU performance of the Note9 shouldn’t be much of a surprise by now as we’ve covered the Snapdragon 845 and Exynos 9810 extensively in this regard. Yet, the Note9 does differ significantly in this regard because Samsung claims to have included a new massive heat-pipe and heat spreader, theoretically much improving the thermal dissipation from the SoC to the body of the phone.

I’m actually starting off this article with a test of the device’s thermals, because I found some quite weird results here that I feel are quite inexplicable in their behaviour, and something that I found to happen in quite a lot of the Snapdragon 845 devices in 2018.

I’m using the on-screen Manhattan 3.1 test in 1440p on-screen mode in a continuous loop for an hour. Besides both Note9’s, I’m also including the S9+ in order to see just how much of an effect the Note9’s new heat-pipe is able to help with performance and thermals.

Performance wise, the results are very surprising. The Snapdragon Note9 for the better part of the first 20 minutes seems to actually perform slightly worse than the S9+. Both phones look to be throttling at virtually the same identical point, which I also found to be quite weird. It’s only much later in the test, after the 35 minute mark, where the Note9 starts to fluctuate more in terms of performance, recovering to a higher GPU frequency for a few minutes before falling back to the minimum performance and continuing so forth ad infinitum.

The Exynos Note9 as expected, performs worse than the Snapdragon unit, but this shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

Actually examining the temperature reported by the phones we again see some very weird behaviour. The temperature here is as reported by an internal sensor on the phones. I don’t usually like showcasing these results because the sensors will vary between devices and vendors. This case is an exception because the sensor between the two Note9’s should be identical (battery PMIC IC), as well as very comparable to the S9+. The actual maximum skin temperature as measured by an IR thermometer are higher than the values shown here.

The one thing that again feels utterly unexplainable to me is the fact that there’s a notable change in throttling behaviour after the 20 minute mark, all seemingly unrelated to the actual temperature of the phones. The Snapdragon Note9 does report much better maximum temperatures over the S9+. The Exynos Note9 here also achieves even better temperatures, and this pretty much falls in line with the fact that the Exynos 9810’s peak power consumption in GPU workloads is actually lower than the Snapdragon 845’s.

Now this 20 minute mark in the temperatures is something that I’ve encountered more often this year across devices, yet I haven’t actually found any good evidence as to explain it. The Snapdragon Note9 showcases that it has intermediate throttling levels later on in its runtime, what puzzles me is as to why the device doesn’t set this medium frequency level earlier in the runtime when reaching the same throttling temperature?

The Snapdragon 845’s behaviour here is very weird: In our initial review of the Galaxy S9+ I mentioned that the phone entered an overheating state killing the benchmark, reaching high skin temperatures of up to 58°C. In subsequent firmware updates over the summer I wasn't able to reproduce this anymore. I actually found the same issue in the Xiaomi Mi MIX2S which was also quickly resolved with a firmware update. This lets me believe that Qualcomm actually has some sort of time-, rather than a temperature-based boost/throttle mode in the drivers of the chip. I’m very perplexed by this as I can’t discern if this is a legitimate mechanism or not.

The benchmarks

The thermal considerations being mentioned, we continue on with our standard set of benchmarks.

In the 3DMark Physics test, the Note 9 fares extremely well in terms of the sustained performance scores. Here we see quite a jump over the results of the S9+, and at the same time this makes the Snapdragon Note9 the best S845 device in this particular benchmark.

The Exynos Note9 also showcases much improved sustained performance scores much higher than that of the S9.

The 3DMark graphics results have me a bit perplexed. The Snapdragon Note9’s sustained performance scores are good- really good- too good.

We showcased that the devices do throttle after certain amount of time, yet in 3DMark I wasn’t able to actually enter this sustained state in any way on the Note9’s, even after prolonged heating. I don’t have a way to loop 3DMark in the same way I loop GFXBench, and I have to wonder if this plays a role here. The Snapdragon Note9 was allowed to get really hot here, reaching 48°C+ skin temperatures near the SoC.

I’m using obfuscated applications IDs to avoid benchmark detection – still I have some reservations about these scores on whether they’re results of genuine thermal mechanisms or something else.

Moving on to GFXBench, we’re seeing some more reasonable sustained performance results in the “High” benchmark mode. Again I have a hard time explaining why the Normal mode scores that much better for the Snapdragon Note9, here it’s maybe a side-effect of the higher ALU utilisation in the high mode which also causes higher power consumption in the Adreno 630.

In Manhattan, we see a similar result as in the Normal Aztec run, with the Snapdragon 845 Note9 maintaining excellent sustained perf.

Switching over to T-Rex, things again are more in line with previous Snapdragon 845 results. The Exynos Note9 also is behaving very similar to the S9.

I’ve ran these tests several times now and again noticed there some unexplained variability in the results that aren’t explained by the actual temperature of the phones. Under thermal stress, the Snapdragon Note9 sometimes performs excellently even at high sustained temperatures of the device, and sometimes it logically throttles as you would expect it to. It’s something I’ll have to dig in a bit more into.

In any case, the verdict here is that the Snapdragon Note9 performs excellently in terms of sustained performance. The Exynos Note9’s sustained performance in GFXBench was a lot more alike the S9 – both devices allowing for much lesser peak temperatures than the Snapdragon counterparts, but again both also showcasing significantly worse performance due to the weaker GPUs.

Conclusion - More of the same

While we never reviewed the Note9, and this piece isn’t meant to be a full review, we can still put out a few sentences about the phone as a whole. Here Samsung is able to build a fantastic device, and there’s very little to criticize the Note9 on. The screen is large, bright, sharp and accurate. The camera is leading edge, even though by now there are devices out in the market which manage to compete quite well with Samsung’s best, especially in low light. Samsung makes no compromises in features, and the Note9 has everything: a 3.5mm headphone jack, wireless charging, IP68 rating, and naturally its key feature, the S-Pen.

While on the outside, the Note9 impresses in all aspects regardless where you purchase it from, on the inside things are again quite different as we again see the usage of two very contrasting SoCs.

I think the following picture sums things up quite well:

Like on the Galaxy S9, the Note9’s Exynos variant is just an overall inferior device. Battery life was one aspect that the Exynos S9s fared quite terribly in, and this time around Samsung did manage to somewhat improve the difference to the Snapdragon 845. Unfortunately it’s not enough as the Snapdragon variant still leads.

While the battery disadvantage has somewhat decreased, Samsung has done nothing to improve the performance of the chipset. Here the Snapdragon 845’s software is still leagues ahead of what the Exynos is able to offer, with the latter still not being able to differentiate itself much from the Exynos 8895 in system performance. The benchmark differences are very much also representative of the real-world performance difference of both variants.

In our recent quarterly smartphone guide, I’ve recommended the Snapdragon Note9 alongside the S9s as among the best Android devices you can buy this holiday. The Exynos Note9 in my opinion again doesn’t really make the cut as you’re paying flagship prices for a device that offers less battery life and performance not much better than last year’s phones.

Having finally gotten these results out, I hope to finally turn the page on the topic, as I’m feeling like a broken record and the coverage is akin keeping on beating a dead horse. The situation is eerily similar to the Galaxy S4 SoC situation from a few years back, only that I feel the differences this year were much worse. Huawei’s vertical integration here is pushing the company to make great strides with every generation, and Apple’s silicon is now so well ahead that we’re not really expecting Android vendors to catch up any time soon.

Samsung as a whole needs to decide where they want to go forward with this dual-sourcing strategy as I currently see it as a lose-lose situation for both the smartphone division as well as their chipset business. Hopefully the Exynos 9820 manages to be competitive chipset and S.LSI manages to finally get serious about execution as a SoC vendor, as otherwise the next few years are just going to a rough ride.