Chipset prices are getting out of control and companies are looking for some cheaper alternatives. The Samsung Galaxy S24 FE is an interesting case – Samsung chose an in-house chip, but not the same that is found in Galaxy S24 and S24+ phones in some parts of the world. Instead, it used the Exynos 2400e.
Samsung is keeping most details under wraps, but it did confirm that the prime Cortex-X4 core is clocked at up to 3.1GHz instead of the 3.2GHz that the regular 2400 chip does.
Now, peak clock speed matters for bursty workloads (e.g. launching an app) and not so much for sustained performance (like gaming). Still, we don’t know whether the other cores have been dialed back. No word on the Xclipse 940 GPU clocks either.
Benchmarking the Samsung Galaxy S24 FE
A deeper investigation will be conducted for the full review, but right now we got to run some CPU and GPU benchmarks – here is the first look at what the Galaxy S24 FE is capable of.
Starting with Geekbench, this is a 10-core CPU with a mix of 1x Cortex-X4, 5x A720 and 2x A520. In multi-core performance, it is certainly a strong contender. We’ve included the Galaxy S24+ as the phone is the same size but uses the full-fat Exynos 2400. The difference is tiny to say the least.
The Xiaomi 14T Pro uses the Dimensity 9300+, which has not one but four Cortex-X4 cores. It pulls slightly ahead, but only slightly. Then there is the Galaxy S23 FE from last year – even though it is only a year old, it used two-year old chipsets (Exynos 2200 or Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, we’ve included both). The 70% performance boost from the new model is impressive.
Flipping over to the single-core test, that 0.1GHz difference between the Exynos 2400 and 2400e should be felt most strongly here. And yet it basically doesn’t matter. The 14T Pro has its prime Cortex-X4 running at up to 3.4GHz, but its score is only 4% higher. The Pixel 9 Pro XL, a $1,200 flagship whose Tensor G4 chip shares pedigree with the Exynos, falls behind in both tests.
Next, we will look at the GPU. The Xclipse 940 is an AMD RDNA 3 design and has proven to be quite powerful. Not as powerful as the Adreno 750 inside the Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S24 Ultra, but still. And it blows the old S23 FE out of the water.
A more interesting comparison is with the iPhone 16 Plus. It’s no flagship, but Apple does charge $900 for it – while a Galaxy S24 FE will only set you back $650. The iPhone pulls ahead by around 4% in the Wild Life Extreme test, but loses by 23% in the Solar Bay test. Solar Bay is a ray tracing test – did we mention that the AMD GPU has hardware acceleration for that? So does the Apple A18 chip, but Apple’s GPU lags behind (the A18 Pro is faster than the A18 in this test, but still behind the Exynos 2400e).
The Exynos 2400e is shaping up to be an interesting chipset – you get 90%-95% of the performance of the Exynos 2400 and you pay less for it. Again, the Galaxy S24 FE launches at $650 for an 8/128GB phone, while a Galaxy S24 (8/128GB) with the non-e chip was $800 at launch and the S24+ (12/256GB) was $1,000.
The reduced clock speeds might have an effect on power usage – here the S24 FE is at a small disadvantage with a 4,700mAh battery compared to 4,900mAh on the S24+. That’s something that we will test during the review process.
And we will be running more benchmarks and doing other tests too. Samsung claims it has improved the cooling compared to the S23 FE (the vapor chamber is 10% larger – not much, but it’s something). We will have more to share once we get back to the office.