Galaxy Note 4 benchmark suggests that the Exynos 5433 outpaces the Snapdragon 805

Last week, hardware specifications for the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 4 leaked via the AnTuTu benchmark database. The eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed that something important was missing – the actual benchmark scores. Fortunately, the full array of CPU and GPU scores have now been posted, shedding light on the performance we can expect from the new Snapdragon 805 and Exynos 5433 SoCs.

For a quick recap, the benchmark listing suggests that the Galaxy Note 4 will come with a QHD (2560×1400) display, 3GB RAM, 32GB internal storage, and a 16 megapixel rear facing camera in both models, with either a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 805 or 1.3GHz Exynos 5433 for the SoC.

The Exynos 5433 comes out as the faster of the two in AnTuTu, surpassing the 40,000 mark with an impressive score of 40,303, to be exact. The new Snapdragon 805 SoC scores a still highly respectable 37780. So, we are looking at around a 15 percent performance boost compared with the current Galaxy Note 3. You’ll also note that the Snapdragon 805 scores only marginally higher than the Snapdragon 801 and 800, reaffirming earlier benchmarks which showed that Qualcomm’s new chips are mostly making ground in the graphics department.

Cortex-A5X vs Krait 450

One of the benefits of AnTuTu is that we can also see scores broken down at the component level, such as the CPU, RAM, and CPU. The quad-core Snapdragon 805 makes use of Qualcomm’s slightly revised Krait 450 CPU cores, which offer up a small performance boost over the current Krait 400 cores, whilst the Exynos 5433 give us an early look at how ARM’s new Cortex-A57 and A53 cores stack up in their octo-core big.LITTLE configuration.

Looking at the chart above, you can clearly see that the Exynos 5433’s new Cortex A5X CPU cores topple Qualcomm’s Krait architecture. Whilst that might not be surprising as we are pitting eight cores against four, Samsung enabled all eight cores to run at once as of the Exynos 5420, but the Exynos 5433 is apparently running at just 1.3GHz. If true, that’s a very impressive CPU score with the potential for large energy efficiencies, due to the low clock speed. We will have to wait to verify this result, but it is a hugely impressive initial display from ARM’s new range of CPU cores.

Adreno 420 vs Mali-T760

Based on AnTuTu, there’s a similar difference between the two SoC’s GPU scores, the Snapdragon 805’s new Adreno 420 GPU loses out to the new ARM Mali-T760 found in the Exynos 5433, at least at this higher display resolution. Interestingly, these two SoCs with newer CPU cores fall just short of the Tegra K1 in the overall AnTuTu rankings, suggesting that NVIDIA’s new chip really is packing in some mighty GPU power.

It’s also worth noting that although the Exynos 5433 seems to have the better GPU, the Mali-T760 is the top end GPU in ARM’s latest generation. Qualcomm, on the other hand, is planning to bring out its even more powerful Adreno 430 with the Snapdragon 810, which could put the Snapdragon range back on top in the future.

Overall, it looks like a very promising start for the next generation of ARM Cortex-A5X CPUs and another step up in terms of GPU performance. Of course, benchmarks have been shown to be unreliable in the past, so we shouldn’t consider these results as final.

Looking at Samsung’s previous rollouts, it seems likely that the two versions of the Galaxy Note 4 will be sold exclusively in different regions, which may leave a bit of a performance gap between consumers. Do you have your eye on a specific version of the Note 4, or is the performance more than good enough in both variants?