Traditionally, there haven't been a lot of differences between the two variants — the Exynos 8895-powered Galaxy S8+ had marginally better battery life over its Snapdragon sibling, but there wasn't a performance differential. With my unit powered by the Exynos 9810, and my colleague Andrew Martonik using the Snapdragon variant, it's time to see how the two variants differ.

From the Galaxy S7 onward, Samsung has offered two variants of its flagships — a model powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform for the U.S. and China, and a global variant featuring the manufacturer's in-house Exynos chipset. That's the case this year as well: the Galaxy S9 and S9+ sold in the U.S. and China are powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 845 , while the models sold in South Korea, UK, India, and other global markets are running the Exynos 9810.

Hardware

There isn't a whole lot to separate the Exynos 9810 from the Snapdragon 845 when it comes to the manufacturing side of things, as both chipsets are built on Samsung Foundry's second-gen 10nm node. The Exynos 9810 features Samsung's third-generation custom core, the M3, along with a Mali-G72 MP18 GPU. The Snapdragon 845, meanwhile, sees the introduction of the Kryo 385 cores, along with the Adreno 630 GPU.

As is to be expected, both chipsets offer increased performance, with Samsung touting a 2x increase in single-core performance compared to last year's Exynos 8895, as well as a 40% uptick in multi-core performance. That's largely due to the M3 cores, which are now clocked at 2.90GHz, a significant bump from the 2.3GHz M2 cores last year. The configuration of the cores itself hasn't changed — there are four M3 high-performance cores that go up to 2.90GHz, backed by four energy-efficient Cortex A55 cores at 1.90GHz.

The Exynos 9810 nearly doubles CPU performance from last year.

The second set of cores are also significant, as they're the long-awaited sequel to the Cortex A53. The A53 has been a mainstay on budget phones and flagships alike for a few years now, and the A55 delivers more performance while consuming less power.

The uptick isn't as radical when it comes to the GPU side of things. Like its predecessor, the Mali-G72 MP18 is based on ARM's Bifrost architecture, and introduces several tweaks and optimizations to eke out more performance. This year's GPU has 18 cores (hence the MP18 denomination) whereas the one seen in the Galaxy S8+ last year, the Mali-G71 MP20, had 20 cores. The core frequency hasn't seen a drastic uptick either — the G72 is clocked at 572MHz, just 30MHz more than the G71. As a result, the overall graphics performance is marginally better than last year.

With the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm is also sticking to an octa-core layout, with four high-performance cores joined by four energy-efficient cores. This year we have the Kryo 385 core, which is a semi-custom design that's based on two of ARM's cores.

The heavy lifting is done by the 2.80GHz core based on the Cortex A75 — ARM's latest offering — and the energy-efficient tasks are handled by a 1.77GHz core based on the Cortex A55. As for the GPU, Qualcomm is touting a 30% uptick in performance from the Adreno 630 over last year's Adreno 540.

Benchmarks

Synthetic benchmarks give us a high-level overview of where the two chipsets differ. Based on the hardware, the Exynos 9810's M3 CPU should outperform the Snapdragon 845, whereas the Adreno 630 should have no issues pulling out ahead of the Mali-G72. Let's see if that's indeed the case. I've also included scores from the Exynos 8895-powered Galaxy S9+ to see how things have changed over the course of a year.