Chipset prices are getting out of hand and companies are looking for cheaper alternatives. The Samsung Galaxy S24FE is an interesting case: Samsung has opted for an internal chip, but not the same one 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 main Cortex-X4 core is clocked at up to 3.1 GHz instead of the 3.2 GHz that the regular 2400 chip does.
Now, peak clock speed matters for fast workloads (e.g. launching an app) and not so much for sustained performance (e.g. gaming). Yet we do not know whether the other cores have been called back. No word on the Xclipse 940 GPU clocks either.
Benchmarking the Samsung Galaxy S24 FE
A deeper dive will be conducted for the full review, but for now we need to run some CPU and GPU benchmarks – here’s 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 competitor. We included the Galaxy S24+ because the phone is the same size but uses the full-fledged Exynos 2400. The difference is small to say the least.
The Xiaomi 14T Pro uses the Dimensity 9300+, which has not one but four Cortex-X4 cores. He pulls forward slightly, but only slightly. Then there’s last year’s Galaxy S23 FE – even though it’s only a year old, it used two-year-old chipsets (Exynos 2200 or Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, we included both). The 70% performance increase of the new model is impressive.
Looking at the single-core test, the 0.1 GHz difference between the Exynos 2400 and 2400e should be most noticeable here. And yet in principle it doesn’t matter. The 14T Pro has its top-of-the-line Cortex-X4 running at up to 3.4GHz, but the score is only 4% higher. The Pixel 9 Pro XL, a $1,200 flagship whose Tensor G4 chip shares pedigree with the Exynos, lags behind in both tests.
Next we 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 in 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 not a flagship, but Apple is asking $900 for it, while a Galaxy S24 FE will only set you back $650. The iPhone improves by about 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 the AMD GPU has hardware acceleration for that? This also applies to the Apple A18 chip, but Apple’s GPU lags behind (the A18 Pro is faster than the A18 in this test, but still lags 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 will launch at $650 for an 8/128GB phone, while a Galaxy S24 (8/128GB) with the non-e-chip cost $800 at launch and the S24+ (12/ 256GB) $1,000.
The lower clock speeds can have an effect on power consumption – here the S24 FE is at a slight disadvantage with a 4,700 mAh battery compared to 4,900 mAh on the S24+. That’s something we’ll test during the review process.
And we will run more benchmarks and do other tests as well. Samsung claims it has improved 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.