Not keen on Exynos 990? You might want to wait for Galaxy Note 20

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The Samsung Galaxy Note 20 (if that’s its name) is expected to launch on schedule in August. As usual, leaks and rumors about Samsung’s second flagship series of the year are already pouring in from all corners.

According to a report from ZDNet Korea, Samsung will fit the Galaxy Note 20 series with an upgraded chipset instead of the Exynos 990. The company is reportedly developing the Exynos 992 for the new phones, and it’s expected to bring improved performance and power efficiency over the 990.

Currently, Samsung sells Snapdragon 865 versions of its Galaxy S20 series in South Korea. The upgrade to the 992 would also reportedly see the company switch back to Exynos processors in its home market.

The new Samsung chipset is believed to be based on Samsung’s 6nm fabrication process. As per previous reports, 6nm chips are on track to go into mass production in the second half of this year.

The current Exynos 990 processor is based on Samsung’s 7nm EUV (extreme ultra-violet) process and has been widely criticized for its weak performance compared to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865. We also pitted an Exynos Galaxy S20 Plus against its Snapdragon counterpart and found that the former was indeed lacking in performance.

Related: Here’s what Samsung says about Exynos Galaxy S20 being weaker than its Snapdragon 865 variant

Going by our tests, Samsung would really need to kick it up a notch as far as GPU-bound performance is concerned. Even its CPU performance was lower than that of the Snapdragon 865, but the difference was minimal and hardly noticeable in day-to-day usage.

Samsung had teamed up with AMD to boost the GPU capabilities of future Exynos chipsets, but the first Samsung mobile chip with an AMD GPU is only expected in 2021.

Hopefully the new Exynos 992 will bring Samsung’s chipset on par with the 865, unless Qualcomm also decides to up its game with a Snapdragon 865 Plus.

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