Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge are available in 2 different variants; one is running Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and the other running Samsung Exynos 8890. The question is which processor is better? Note that Samsung released the Snapdragon variant in the U.S. and China, and shipped the Exynos version to other countries.
In this Galaxy S7: Snapdragon vs Exynos article, we don’t want to distract you with benchmark numbers and statistics on the paper, and in the contrary, we want to show you the differences between these models in daily usage, regardless of what the numbers say.
First, let’s take a look at the table below (PhoneArena) which is the result of some known benchmark tests. As you can see, there is no significant difference between Snapdragon and Exynos on Galaxy S7 and both variants are doing pretty well. The only noticeable thing is about the Sunspider test, which is a browsing benchmark.
Well, as promised, let’s skip the numbers and see the real differences between Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890 on Galaxy S7 (Edge):
RAM Management: Remember all the fuss about Ram Management issues in the Galaxy S6? Well, this year it seems the issues have been solved BUT only for the Exynos variant of the Galaxy S7. According to several tests Galaxy S7 running Snapdragon 820 is still facing the RAM Management issues and changing apps take longer time than Exynos 8890 model. So, Exynos 8890 has a better performance (read, noticeable better performance) when it comes to re-launching the apps from the RAM memory.
Launching the Apps from Memory: In this test, the Samsung Galaxy S7 with Exynos 8890 showed a better performance and apps tend to open faster (fo r the first time and from the internal memory, not from the RAM) than the Snapdragon model.
Battery Life: Here is the most important part of the comparison between Galaxy S7 Snapdragon 820 and Galaxy S7 Exynos 8890. Believe it or not, but the Exynos model managed to last longer than the Snapdragon model. When doing a Video Playback test, the Exynos variant managed to perform better and last about 20% longer than the Snapdragon variant, and in the Web Browsing test this number increased to about 33%, which we believe is huge and kind of a big deal.
Slow-Motion Video Paly back: This is a new issues and has been reportedly lately by the Galaxy S7 Snapdragon 820 owners. According to the reports, when you want to play back the already recorded slow-mo videos, the video starts to stutter and skip. The odd thing is that this slow-motion issue has not been seen on the Samsung Galaxy S7 Exynos 8890 model.
Galaxy S7: Snapdragon 820 vs Exynos 8890; Who is the Winner?
Well, based on the benchmarks results, the winner should be the Galaxy S7 Snapdragon 820, but based on the daily usage (and not trusting the numbers in the benchmarks) then winner is undoubtedly the Galaxy S7 Exynos 8890. It runs the applications faster, calls them again from the RAM memory faster, and manages to use the power more efficiently. It also doesn’t come with some strange issues, including the stuttered slow-motion video play back.
Due to the Samsung’s distribution policy, you may not have a choice to choose between the Snapdragon and Exynos model. but if you have the choice we recommend you choosing the Exynos 8890 model as it seems the Korean have put more energy and time on this variant, compared to the Snapdragon 820 model. And keep in mind that, Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge are still the best Android devices to date, regardless of their processors.
