Phone Arena has tested both versions of the Note 20 Ultra in popular test suites – everywhere the version with the Exynos 990 is significantly inferior to the version with the Snapdragon 865+ chip. While both variants are still powerful enough to handle any task, the 865+’s upsides aren’t limited to speed.

Even compared to the Snapdragon 865, the new Qualcomm chip brings a higher peak clock speed of the most powerful core, noticeably faster graphics, even broader support for 5G networking standards, as well as the latest Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6E standards.

Wi-Fi 6E in the Snapdragon 865+ means the Note 20 Ultra is capable of up to 6 GHz. It will function like regular Wi-Fi 6 at 5 GHz, but with more channels that won’t interfere with each other or overlap. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi 6E supports 14 additional 80-MHz channels and 7 additional 160-MHz channels, which reduces interference from congested wireless networks.

New features of Bluetooth 5.2 compared to Bluetooth 5.1:

• higher quality audio codec with lower power consumption;
• independent synchronization of fully wireless headsets and broadcasting audio streams to multiple listeners in different languages;
• multiple applications can communicate with a Bluetooth Low Energy device at the same time, reducing latency and interference.

In addition, throttling should be taken into account when the chip heats up: the versions with the Exynos 990 chip show themselves in this respect much worse than the versions based on the Snapdragon 865+. And no more than 7 hours of battery life when playing YouTube for a modern smartphone with a 4500 mAh battery and an OLED screen is not enough. Overall, both synthetic tests and real-life battery tests give the Snapdragon 865+ Note 20 Ultra an edge over the Exynos 990 variant. Not that this is a big surprise, but hopefully the Galaxy S21 will have a year, Samsung will either stop releasing split versions or bring its Exynos chips up to the level of a direct competitor.