There's now a petition to stop Samsung from using Exynos processors (Update)

Update, April 6 2020 (2AM ET): Samsung has issued a statement after it was criticised for using the Exynos 990 chipset in some Galaxy S20 phones. The Galaxy S20 series is available in either Exynos 990 or Snapdragon 865 variants.

The company noted that both mobile chipsets undergo the same testing scenarios — you can read the full statement over here.

Original article, March 20, 2020 (10:30AM ET): A new petition has popped up on Change.org against the use of Exynos processors in Samsung phones. The petition demands that Samsung stop using Exynos chipsets instead of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon counterparts. It also calls into question the use of Samsung camera sensors on Samsung phones in place of the ones made by Sony.

“These parts are inferior, and there are numerous comparisons online,” the online petition states. “The Exynos phones are slower, have worse battery life, worse camera sensors and processing, get hotter and throttle faster, etc.,” it adds.

It’s true that Samsung’s Exynos variants traditionally underperform in comparison to Snapdragon versions. The company launches Exynos variants of its phones — especially flagships such as the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note series — in markets such as Asia and Europe. Meanwhile, the same Samsung phones are launched in North America with Snapdragon processors.

Depending on which one you get, there could be major differences in your experience. For instance, the Snapdragon 865 features Cortex A77 cores which promise up to a 20% performance boost in comparison to the Cortex A76 cores used in Samsung’s competing Exynos 990 chipset. The Snapdragon flagship also gets the Adreno 650 GPU which outperforms the Mali G77 GPU on the top-of-the-line Exynos SoC.

Our own testing also revealed some pretty big differences between the CPU and GPU benchmark results of the Snapdragon and Exynos variants of the Galaxy S20 Plus. We’ll post those results very soon.

In the meantime, the petition on Change.org is still awaiting signatures. So far, it has managed to accumulate only 17 signatures, which is not nearly enough for Samsung to sit up and take notice. It’s not like it doesn’t already know about this problem.

The Exynos vs Snapdragon issue pops up every year when Samsung releases its flagships. If it hasn’t changed its stance on custom chipsets yet, it’s unlikely it will do so anytime soon. However, the company is said to be in talks with AMD to boost GPU performance on its Exynos processors so maybe that could make things better.

What do you think Samsung should do? Should the company only sell Snapdragon versions of its phones across different markets? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.