We will see, nothing comes for free and 2.9ghz is very high for a wide core, be interesting to see what frequency is typical outside of a short burst. I find it odd that MT is only 40% higher, of course the big cores are going to be clocked much lower..but still with A55s and new fabric/likely new memory controller...i expected better.
Then again I didn't expect such an increase in ST performance, incredible really. What a shame it will be mated underneath touchwhiz..
I find it strange you don't like Touchwiz... It's way better than the pile of brown stuff that is AOSP, or even "Google's take". It's a double whammy in irony; Google has long ways before their software becomes anywhere near the practicality and efficiency of Samsung's, especially in stock apps, browser, connectivity, general device settings or even design.
Well, the design part is subjective, some find the inconsistent mess that is stock "appealing" for some reason, but the rest of the points aren't subjective.
Lol, are you for real, mate? Stock Android's appeal isn't in looks (which, subjectively, is better than TW, imo), but smoothness and consistency. Stock Android has much less frame drops and achieves 60 FPS more frequently than TW. You notice this everywhere and all the time in actions and animations. Pixel UI just feels more fluid. Also, it's far more consistent with fewer hiccups and freezes than TW.
And did I mention lack of bloat? Quick and longer updates?
I just HATE all the misinformation ya'll been spoon fed by the internet.
Stock doesn't sell. It just isn't popular. No one cares for it outside the internet reviewer bubble. Period. The only front end UX's consumers care about are iOS and Touchwiz, the rest of the popular skins (Chinese OEMs) are copies from those two. This is a fact no one can refute, no matter how much you're brainwashed to believe otherwise.
Quick updates have nothing to do with stock. Google builds their code against their own phones, that's why they get a head start, and even then, their updates are pact full of bugs, lots of them being major. Apple has been copying that from Google for some reason recently (sorry, had to throw that in). Google only supports phones for 2 years with updates, just like Samsung, they've only just recently promised to support them for 3 major updates, after promising not to f*** with the underlying code too much after Oreo. You can expect similar update support from Samsung and other OEMs that lauch devices with Oreo, and probably even more so, since Samsung and others are the ones who pushed Google for the monthly patch initiative. The GS5 and Note4 are still getting updates to this day. Get this: NO ONE WANTS THE LATEST VERSION OF ANDROID. No one wants to deal with the software bugs and instability. Look at iPhone users. Security updates are what counts.
Pixels aren't faster than other Android devices, it's quite the opposite actually, and the smoothness you talk about (after lots of research) comes from increasing buffers, aggressive scheduling and other hacks to the OS that do more harm than good in the longer run. Android absolutely does NOT perform great out of the box. OEMs and other ROM devs have to literally fix Android before it's ready for prime time for actual users who want popular features and things to just work.
Android as an OS still has ways to go before reaching iOS and Windows Mobile level of efficiency and UI fluidity in an elegant manner. Massive re-writes need to be done. Even Google are seemingly giving up on all that and developing a new OS from scratch. Lets see where that goes.
Listen, I get it, Youtubers and the photographers and lawyers at the Verge are promoting Google's failure devices hard, but that doesn't make them any good. You need to understand these guys are businesses that make money from what they recommend, and have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Most of the enthusiasts on XDA fall in the same category. I seriously wouldn't recommend a Pixel for someone I care about. They're the worse thing you can spend ~$850 on, they're basically a rip-off.
If you're spending more than $600 on a phone, do yourself a favor and get a Galaxy S/Note or an iPhone. Nothing else is worth the premium.
I must say that agree on your point about Samsung devices over pixels. I never understood the positive feedback for google branded devices that are released months after the Samsung phones with the same soc’s and a few less features usually. Great marketing I guess.
Windows mobile was a well architected platform, especially with the addition of .net native however, sometimes technology is not the only factor in success and as always with Microsoft, there timing was terrible.
I agree pixel phones are a rip off..just like majority of apple devices. But let's be clear, if you value speed and responsiveness, touchwhiz is the worst..by far. I've have many Samsung's, used other people's new Samsung's, and I've had nexus phones, night and day difference in responsiveness..I have a low end mi max 2..containing a puny Snapdragon 620?....smooth as butter..much faster than any Samsung device I've ever had or used...the fastest phones on the market for all round smoothness, web browsing and general app opening are OnePlus phones..the software is tuned to lightning speeds, it bests all other phones with same hardware but different software.. including Google's own rip off pixels.
Touchwhiz seems to me from using decent skins...to have a couple of milliseconds lag and some bank and stutter, just my personal experience.
Maybe it's time you listen to the people who actually write their opinion about this matter based on their experience. I buy and sell phones for a living, and therefore get to own and test virtually every flagship phone out there. That includes all the Samsung Galaxy S flagships out there and all the Google Pixels and Nexuses. I also have a pretty large family, who have been Samsung Galaxy owners since the S2 first came out, with several Galaxy S and Note flagships in the house at all times. And not one of my family members or friends whom I've given OnePlus 3/5's (runs OxygenOS, which is not as smooth as Pixel UI, but close to it) or Pixels to, have preferred TouchWiz over them. They all have commented on the latter units being much more smooth and consistent with their use. On the other hand, over the years of using Samsung flagships, they have constantly complained about lag, slowdown over time, freezes, phones being completely useless after a while or after an update, etc., and have often bought new Samsung flagships because of it.
My experience is similiar. Although Samsung's flagships are without a doubt the best phones out there in terms of hardware (best displays, top notch cameras, great CPUs that will now become market leading, amazing designs, etc.), the software just doesn't cut it. Even with the new Samsung Experience introduced by Note 8, in which TouchWiz has become a whole lot smoother, they're still a fair amount behind Pixel UI in smoothness. And you notice it everywhere and in everything, if you've ever used a Pixel phone.
You claim reviewers are sell-outs to Google, which is kind of ridiculous. I completely agree reviewers aren't really as neutral as they claim/seem, and cater to the industry in that they act as indirect advertisement for the products they showcase (this even more true in consumer reviews as it is in journalism about politics -- you can read about how it works in detail in Manufacturing Consent). But Google doesn’t even have 1% market share in the smartphone industry; Samsung has well over 20%, if I remember correctly. Google are completely dwarfed by Samsung in this area. If there’s an influence on reviewers on how they talk about a unit, which we both agree there is, who do you think has most influence on those reviewers? Clearly, Samsung (and Apple) – not Google. Samsung is not just a larger company, but also provides units with more popularity among viewers/readers than Pixels to these reviewers. Not to mention more units as well. They have the most influence on reviewers of any OEM.
The fact that so many reviewers have Pixels as their daily drivers speaks for itself. These people even explain why this is the case: the software. The software defines how you use a device. And in that regard, the Pixel UI is simply better than TouchWiz. Maybe not in total software features. But in actual usage, it is prominently smoother and more consistent; everybody works more effortlessly and reliably every time, every day, every week and every month. I know this for a fact based on my own experience with flagship phones from all the large OEMs.
Maybe software isn’t as important to you (or maybe you just haven’t tried the Pixel – which I suspect is the case). But it is a lot of other people. And I know for a fact that when I introduced people who don’t know about the Pixel to it, they appreciate its software experience more than any other phone they’ve used.
The level of absurdity in your post is ridiculous.
"Stock doesn't sell", what? Did you ever think that the correlation between marketing costs, like advertisements, and sales of units, has something to do with it? The high marketing costs of Samsung and Apple over the years, as well asappropriation of market shareis why their phones are so popular. It's not down to any independent popular, no more than McDonald's superiority as the most popular food chain is down to their food being the best out there of any restaurant?
As for updates, Google’s updates are nowhere near as buggy as those of Apple's have been the recent years (iOS 11, for example, is a complete disaster). Nor is it as buggy as when OEMs like Samsung update their phones to newer Android versions, which they always implement poorly. The effect of the updates on older devices is almost different. I've had a wide range of Nexus devices over the years, and almost all of them have only gotten better with newer updates, as opposed to Apple iPhone and iPad units, or quite a few Samsung units. Nexus 5 just got better with newer updates, increasing in smoothness and battery life. Nexus 5X recently got quite a lot better battery because of the Oreo update. The update last year with HDR+ also made the camera better. Not to mention a general improvement in smoothness as well with Nougat and Oreo updates. My Nexus 7 kept getting better for every update as well.
You also claim iOS to be smoother, which is again wrong. Here you clearly reveal that you haven't used the Pixel or Pixel 2. Because if you did, you'd know that stock Android, or at least Pixel UI, has been smoother than iOS in general since Nougat. The rest of the garbage that OEMs deliver certainly isn’t smoother (EMUI, MIUI, LG UX, TouchWiz, Sense, etc) – but stock Android is. That is, it overall has fewer microstutters, frame drops and jitter and jank in animation and tasks than iOS. Sure, iOS is better in certain important instances, like scrolling, zooming -- the browser experience on iOS is far superior. But overall, Android is a smoother experience. I know this because I use devices on both platforms, and have been doing so for years. Hell, even TouchWiz is getting close to iOS in smoothness with the recent Samsung Experience update (which the Note 8 currently runs, and S8 will do with the Oreo update).
I like my pixel. it is faster and smother and gets updated faster than anything Samsung offers. I do not use 99% of the "features" offered by touchwiz or (insert name of phone vendor here). Also since it is direct from Google i do not have to worry about the carrier crapware either. Samsung has finally offered direct sales so that cuts down on the carrier bloat..but There are multiple layers that still hinder Samsung updates. Not only does Samsung hae to process the base Android OS updates but also their own TW overlay and then they have to wait on facebook(oculus). All of these(plus the absolutely huge amount of phones it has out there) lead to Samsung being one of the slowest to keep their phones updated. I'll pay the price for my pixel for speedy performance, timely updates, and not having 3-4 other layers of software that add more bloat and resource usage on top of it.
Good article! Main takehome for me (in addition to those already made here) is that Intel's troubles positioning their Atom chips have increased. In a laptop or 2-in-1, TDP allowances are much higher (and the batteries beefier) than for phones, so one could let all M3 cores rip , as opposed to just one. I believe this chip is also about Samsung not wanting to cede ground to Qualcomm's 835/845 in the entry-level laptop/ultralight market. We'd know for sure if Samsung and MS demo a "Windows 10 on Exynos" device. Given the trouble in Wintel land, I bet that we see such a proof of concept before the Summer.
Thanks for the informative article. It's great to see you back on the grind again, Andrei. Always enjoyed your great in-depth-cover on previous articles and your efforts in the field of custom kernels.
I'm really fascinated by how far SLSI pushed their custom µArch in this iteration in order to compete with Apple. I guess their custom approach finally starts to pay itself of (and I think it's also where the transistor budget of the two "missing" GPU-clusters went).
Btw: I noticed a niggly little fault in the text: "The Exynos 8890 was advertised by SLSI to run up to 2.7GHz, while the S8 limited it to 2.6GHz." - I suppose you meant S7.
One more correction/clarification: the two complex pipes can also execute all simple operations (arithmetic and logical instructions) like the two simple pipes.
The 8890 boosts its clockspeed (for the big cluster) to about 2.6 GHz, as long as there's load on only one or two cores. If the third core has to kick in, the clockspeed for the whole cluster gets capped to 2.3 GHz. On the 8895 though, Samsung got rid of the turbo boost, so even if there's just one Mongoose core that's fully utilized, the maximum clockspeed remains at around 2.3 GHz.
But given the intrinsic nature of the Spectre vulnerability in high-performance CPU designs, and the fact that this chip needs to be shipping now for a spring phone launch, and I'm going to be surprised if Samsung had time to harden it against Spectre in hardware.
CPU designers have had a head start relative to the media though. They've known about the vulnerabilities long before. Would be interesting to know if any measures were actually taken.
"CPU designers have had a head start relative to the media though. They've known about the vulnerabilities long before. "
Note that most of that head start was used to do research on the problem and potential solutions. The actual action window for the CPU vendors was relatively short, which is a problem given the very long development cycles for CPUs.
even if samsung had known a month before the researchers discovered the bugs they wouldn't have been able to do much I bet. Against Meltdown MAYBE. But sure not against Spectre - it will take years before vendors release the first CPU with serious protection against it I bet. Maybe a few quick fixes in the next gen but no real solutions get - it is so fundamental to how high end CPU cores work it will need real research to find solutions that won't simply kill performance.
Probably. Mot cpu road-maps are at least a year long..sometimes two. it will be interesting to see if any company is going to throw out the millions or billions in R&D to rearchitect so soon.
In principle Apple could ship updates in May or so with the A11X. But it's ALSO possible that they could simply drop that plan and ship new iPads in November or so, with an A12X. Point being that after learning about Meltdown/Spectre they used the A11X as something of a dummy, made various HW changes on it to see how they behave, and retrofitted those to the A12/A12X.
I'm not asserting that they did that, but they do have a flexibility along that dimension that pretty much no-one else has. The iPad doesn't have a hard schedule that everyone expects, and the A12X is probably designed in sync with the A12, even if it's only scheduled to be manufactured 6 months later. Apple COULD decide (especially given their constant fsckups with macOS security) that the best way to regain some positive PR is to make a decision that the next chip they ship they can announce as being "the first CPU released that's designed to be free of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities".
The Cortex-A75 is supposed to be vulnerable to the same Meltdown issue add Intel CPUs, according to ARM. Will be interesting to see if any of the devices using A75s or derivatives like Samsung M3 or the Kyro cores in the SD845 will be patched from the get-go. Or will we be waiting on Google to develop Android patches?
I dont think this is an ARM derivative and while it accidentally might be resistant go meltdown it will 99.983% sure be vulnerable to all Spectre variants. I leave the tiny bit for the super small chance it is slightly less vulnerable to one or another spectre type issue.
Why are you assuming that Samsung will use Snapdragon? When they had a far better chip (SD810 times), they did not and now Samsung is likely to lose Qualcomm as a foundry customer too so, has Qualcomm hinted that Samsung is a customer for SD845?
Do hope they got single core turbo this time around, doesn't seem feasible to go with such a core at such clocks otherwise.
Well they (Samsung) still don't have better GPU which maters a lot, Adrenos are 2x more efficient compared to last MALI. Other than that they can't sell with their LTE modems globally... The good thing about this with both Samsung and Apple is that QC now won't have a chance & will bring its new (gen) ARM server based CPU's to mobile SoC's and beyond.
On the GPU side, they've been hiding the differences pretty well so far and no reason to expect a change there. This cycle they should be able to cover all markets with their modem as even the lower end 7872 has CDMA. Qualcomm's server core is likely not all that different from Kryo and we don't want that.
I think there is evidence Samsung will use qualcomm. The leaks indicate it.
"The downside is ET News says SLP will only be used in Exynos versions of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus and an archaic licensing agreement with Qualcomm forbids Samsung from shipping Exynos-based smartphones to the U.S. Instead"
"SLSI’s claim of doubling single-threaded performance does not seem farfetched at all."
Except that what it takes to boost IPC by 50% is not really covered at all by these visible changes -- same problem as Apple :-( For example we know nothing about - quality of the branch prediction - quality of the prefetchers and cache placement algorithms - what instruction fusion is being provided? - how aggressive are the load/store queues (eg was the Moshovos patent licensed?) - quality of the memory controller (eg seems to be have MASSIVELY improved in the A11 to better than Intel levels) - etc
I'd say that all we see here is the possibility that Samsung could hit 50%, not proof that they are likely to have done so. I'm guessing that can't have improved as much as necessary in one year across all the areas I list above. (Certainly the "leaks" [probably faked...] for the GB4 scores aren't especially ambitious, giving only 2422!)
Just to be clear here, let's say that we want to see IPC increased by 50% across GB4 single-threaded. Multi-core is uninteresting, and spare us the rants about how some other benchmark (which conveniently has no iOS numbers available) is somehow magically better. [And yeah, we'd all like to see SPEC2006 numbers for Apple. Hell we'd like to also see them for the iPhone7 ... But until they arrive, GB4 is the best we have.]
My point was that, for a site that's (according to some commenters) supposed to be all Apple love all the time, the iPhone 7 deep dive was never delivered, and the iPhone 8/X deep dive also seems to be MIA.
Whatever Apple scores it doesn't matter because it is unsustainable; the chip is too big and power hungry. The iphone 7 literally cannot sustain its own SoC performance and resorts to throttling after just one year or less. For three generations(possibly 4 with the x and the 8) Apple has been selling flawed devices to unsuspecting consumers. They pulled a "dieselgate" right under the nose of everyone.
And why nobody cares about GPU, which plays worse on the battery than the CPU ?
Is it a batch of faulty batteries or Apple is trying to extend the battery endurance a bit ? People just went nuts on this “issue”, far overblown like everything that has something to do with Apple. It’s planed obsolence, crap chip design. Who does believe that Apple with their intel swallowing desire to make powerful silicon designed a chip their phone cannot power ? I think that is bad lokk at the problematic. They designed a chip for a phone not in reverse.
A smartphone that cannot sustain its own performance is a flawed device. 50% throttle is not a feature, it is a band-aid aiming to avoid a total recall. We are talking about year old devices that get throttled with batteries that pass Apple's own diagnostics. No smartphone, laptop, tablet on this planet acts this way. It's the battery life that gets shorter and not the performance kneecapped.
Around the 2 year mark, coincidently when the warranty expires(in Europe) the phone is throttled into oblivion. Directly, or indirectly if you wish, this IS planned obsolescence.
Throttle in 1 year? The 3 a10 devices in my household which are 15 months old hasn’t throttled and the a9 which is more than 2 years old hasn’t either.
Not saying some users have seen throttling, but I have not seen in any phones that I have access to say so saying a blanket statement of throttle after 1 year and useless after 2 is ridiculous.
The so called "fix" perhaps fleshes out the weaker combos. Your devices were less susceptible as they happened to have a sturdier battery.
It's not useless per se, just a 40%-50% permanent penalty. All concealed, gaming warranty or insurance conditions. This is a cover up that plays exactly into planned obsolescence. Directly or indirectly, this is the effect.
The GB4 numbers suggest that Samsung did indeed pull it off --- Integer IPC about 50% higher, so about A10 levels, and FP IPC (which is easier to boost) about90% higher, again A10 levels. Very impressive!
In my defense at least part of that is surely due to precisely the various items I said were not covered by the article, from uncore (prefetch and cache quality) to front-end. From recent LLVM activity we DO know, for example, that Samsung has become much more aggressive about instruction pairs they are willing to fuse (beyond the literals and compare+branch, they now have AES fusion, arithmetic followed by compare, and compare followed by selection).
Fusion is a great way to amplify the performance of your queues, and I think there still remains some performance to be squeezed out of fusion (especially now fusion of three successive instruction in the form of what are sometime called "chains"). Meaning that (IMHO) I don't see A11 levels of performance as the end of the road --- I expect Apple still to make meaningful improvement in bothe the A12 and A13. And it's nice to see that Samsung will likely be alongside them -- perhaps lagging by twelve to eighteen months, but providing enough pressure to keep Apple going. (As for Intel which is already about 30% behind Apple in IPC, well... I think in the Apple community we all pretty much hope that Samsung will move soon to shipping Exynos in laptops, putting more pressure for Apple to do the same, and soon enough [by 2020?] transitioning the Mac off x86.)
It's a shame we (still...) don't have comparable Apple numbers (eg SPEC2006) but both browser numbers and my tests regarding Wolfram Player suggest that Apple's performance advantage is broad and real, not limited to Geekbench. As for Samsung? Did they optimize all structures ONLY for Geekbench? Do they run GB at unsustainable frequencies (ie good old fashioned benchmark detector cheating)? Or the slightly more subtle "run at frequencies that are stupid in terms of the energy/time tradeoff"? Do they have a truly lousy DVFS scheduler?
Excellent article again, thank you! That core diagram is beautiful -heart eyes-. I hope the drivers for their GPU has been enhanced as much as this CPU core has. Can't wait to see how it compares to the A75/Kryo 385
Can someone elaborate why Samsung doesn't equip US devices with exynos soc's? They did on the galaxy S6 and even used their own in house Shannon lte modem. The only reason I've read that they use Qualcomm in the US is because of the integrated modem in the snapdragon soc but it's clearly not necessary as the S6 stands testament to.
The S6 was equipped with the Exynos 7420, which was only an AP, which means that it didn't have an integrated baseband processor. In Europe, the 7420 was combined with an external Shannon 333 baseband, whereas the NA version (and I also think the Chinese...) was equipped with an external Qualcomm MDM9635 BB.
Since the 889x-series has it's own fully integrated BB processor, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to combine it with an external BB processor, when Samsung can just use an SoC that has all the demanded functionality on board while delivering equal performance figures. But we'll see how that changes with the 9810, which I believe will be the turning point for SLSI (look at the recently announced Meizu phone, which has an Exynos with " CDMA support a couple of days ago...).
As long as Exynos(and Snapdragon for that matter) are smaller in die size for the same process node they will never reach Apple's single-threaded performance. That's not a bad thing because:
1. Smartphones are powerful enough for average daily usage.
2. Apple's performance is not sustainable as we've seen from the throttling fiasco.
This is a honest to goodness big fat core! Will it out perform A75? I'm not so sure, it seems to be bigger than A75, in many of the same proportions that Mongoose 2 was to A73/Kryo 280. As we've recently seen they performed roughly the same only with substantial differences in power consumption and efficiency. Granted Mongoose 3 has alot of execution units, and a 228 entry RoB, the branch predictor accuracy must be insane!
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french toast - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Jesus...Samsung have gone all apple...power consumption is going to be very interesting indeed.lilmoe - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Ironically, Samsung waited before going all in "to get it right".The SoC wars are back ya'll.
french toast - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
We will see, nothing comes for free and 2.9ghz is very high for a wide core, be interesting to see what frequency is typical outside of a short burst.I find it odd that MT is only 40% higher, of course the big cores are going to be clocked much lower..but still with A55s and new fabric/likely new memory controller...i expected better.
Then again I didn't expect such an increase in ST performance, incredible really.
What a shame it will be mated underneath touchwhiz..
lilmoe - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
I find it strange you don't like Touchwiz... It's way better than the pile of brown stuff that is AOSP, or even "Google's take". It's a double whammy in irony; Google has long ways before their software becomes anywhere near the practicality and efficiency of Samsung's, especially in stock apps, browser, connectivity, general device settings or even design.Well, the design part is subjective, some find the inconsistent mess that is stock "appealing" for some reason, but the rest of the points aren't subjective.
generalako - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Lol, are you for real, mate? Stock Android's appeal isn't in looks (which, subjectively, is better than TW, imo), but smoothness and consistency. Stock Android has much less frame drops and achieves 60 FPS more frequently than TW. You notice this everywhere and all the time in actions and animations. Pixel UI just feels more fluid. Also, it's far more consistent with fewer hiccups and freezes than TW.And did I mention lack of bloat? Quick and longer updates?
lilmoe - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
I just HATE all the misinformation ya'll been spoon fed by the internet.Stock doesn't sell. It just isn't popular. No one cares for it outside the internet reviewer bubble. Period. The only front end UX's consumers care about are iOS and Touchwiz, the rest of the popular skins (Chinese OEMs) are copies from those two. This is a fact no one can refute, no matter how much you're brainwashed to believe otherwise.
Quick updates have nothing to do with stock. Google builds their code against their own phones, that's why they get a head start, and even then, their updates are pact full of bugs, lots of them being major. Apple has been copying that from Google for some reason recently (sorry, had to throw that in). Google only supports phones for 2 years with updates, just like Samsung, they've only just recently promised to support them for 3 major updates, after promising not to f*** with the underlying code too much after Oreo. You can expect similar update support from Samsung and other OEMs that lauch devices with Oreo, and probably even more so, since Samsung and others are the ones who pushed Google for the monthly patch initiative. The GS5 and Note4 are still getting updates to this day. Get this: NO ONE WANTS THE LATEST VERSION OF ANDROID. No one wants to deal with the software bugs and instability. Look at iPhone users. Security updates are what counts.
Pixels aren't faster than other Android devices, it's quite the opposite actually, and the smoothness you talk about (after lots of research) comes from increasing buffers, aggressive scheduling and other hacks to the OS that do more harm than good in the longer run. Android absolutely does NOT perform great out of the box. OEMs and other ROM devs have to literally fix Android before it's ready for prime time for actual users who want popular features and things to just work.
Android as an OS still has ways to go before reaching iOS and Windows Mobile level of efficiency and UI fluidity in an elegant manner. Massive re-writes need to be done. Even Google are seemingly giving up on all that and developing a new OS from scratch. Lets see where that goes.
Listen, I get it, Youtubers and the photographers and lawyers at the Verge are promoting Google's failure devices hard, but that doesn't make them any good. You need to understand these guys are businesses that make money from what they recommend, and have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Most of the enthusiasts on XDA fall in the same category. I seriously wouldn't recommend a Pixel for someone I care about. They're the worse thing you can spend ~$850 on, they're basically a rip-off.
If you're spending more than $600 on a phone, do yourself a favor and get a Galaxy S/Note or an iPhone. Nothing else is worth the premium.
Zeratul56 - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
I must say that agree on your point about Samsung devices over pixels. I never understood the positive feedback for google branded devices that are released months after the Samsung phones with the same soc’s and a few less features usually. Great marketing I guess.Windows mobile was a well architected platform, especially with the addition of .net native however, sometimes technology is not the only factor in success and as always with Microsoft, there timing was terrible.
french toast - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
I agree pixel phones are a rip off..just like majority of apple devices.But let's be clear, if you value speed and responsiveness, touchwhiz is the worst..by far.
I've have many Samsung's, used other people's new Samsung's, and I've had nexus phones, night and day difference in responsiveness..I have a low end mi max 2..containing a puny Snapdragon 620?....smooth as butter..much faster than any Samsung device I've ever had or used...the fastest phones on the market for all round smoothness, web browsing and general app opening are OnePlus phones..the software is tuned to lightning speeds, it bests all other phones with same hardware but different software.. including Google's own rip off pixels.
Touchwhiz seems to me from using decent skins...to have a couple of milliseconds lag and some bank and stutter, just my personal experience.
generalako - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Maybe it's time you listen to the people who actually write their opinion about this matter based on their experience. I buy and sell phones for a living, and therefore get to own and test virtually every flagship phone out there. That includes all the Samsung Galaxy S flagships out there and all the Google Pixels and Nexuses. I also have a pretty large family, who have been Samsung Galaxy owners since the S2 first came out, with several Galaxy S and Note flagships in the house at all times. And not one of my family members or friends whom I've given OnePlus 3/5's (runs OxygenOS, which is not as smooth as Pixel UI, but close to it) or Pixels to, have preferred TouchWiz over them. They all have commented on the latter units being much more smooth and consistent with their use. On the other hand, over the years of using Samsung flagships, they have constantly complained about lag, slowdown over time, freezes, phones being completely useless after a while or after an update, etc., and have often bought new Samsung flagships because of it.My experience is similiar. Although Samsung's flagships are without a doubt the best phones out there in terms of hardware (best displays, top notch cameras, great CPUs that will now become market leading, amazing designs, etc.), the software just doesn't cut it. Even with the new Samsung Experience introduced by Note 8, in which TouchWiz has become a whole lot smoother, they're still a fair amount behind Pixel UI in smoothness. And you notice it everywhere and in everything, if you've ever used a Pixel phone.
You claim reviewers are sell-outs to Google, which is kind of ridiculous. I completely agree reviewers aren't really as neutral as they claim/seem, and cater to the industry in that they act as indirect advertisement for the products they showcase (this even more true in consumer reviews as it is in journalism about politics -- you can read about how it works in detail in Manufacturing Consent). But Google doesn’t even have 1% market share in the smartphone industry; Samsung has well over 20%, if I remember correctly. Google are completely dwarfed by Samsung in this area. If there’s an influence on reviewers on how they talk about a unit, which we both agree there is, who do you think has most influence on those reviewers? Clearly, Samsung (and Apple) – not Google. Samsung is not just a larger company, but also provides units with more popularity among viewers/readers than Pixels to these reviewers. Not to mention more units as well. They have the most influence on reviewers of any OEM.
The fact that so many reviewers have Pixels as their daily drivers speaks for itself. These people even explain why this is the case: the software. The software defines how you use a device. And in that regard, the Pixel UI is simply better than TouchWiz. Maybe not in total software features. But in actual usage, it is prominently smoother and more consistent; everybody works more effortlessly and reliably every time, every day, every week and every month. I know this for a fact based on my own experience with flagship phones from all the large OEMs.
Maybe software isn’t as important to you (or maybe you just haven’t tried the Pixel – which I suspect is the case). But it is a lot of other people. And I know for a fact that when I introduced people who don’t know about the Pixel to it, they appreciate its software experience more than any other phone they’ve used.
generalako - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
The level of absurdity in your post is ridiculous."Stock doesn't sell", what? Did you ever think that the correlation between marketing costs, like advertisements, and sales of units, has something to do with it? The high marketing costs of Samsung and Apple over the years, as well asappropriation of market shareis why their phones are so popular. It's not down to any independent popular, no more than McDonald's superiority as the most popular food chain is down to their food being the best out there of any restaurant?
As for updates, Google’s updates are nowhere near as buggy as those of Apple's have been the recent years (iOS 11, for example, is a complete disaster). Nor is it as buggy as when OEMs like Samsung update their phones to newer Android versions, which they always implement poorly.
The effect of the updates on older devices is almost different. I've had a wide range of Nexus devices over the years, and almost all of them have only gotten better with newer updates, as opposed to Apple iPhone and iPad units, or quite a few Samsung units. Nexus 5 just got better with newer updates, increasing in smoothness and battery life. Nexus 5X recently got quite a lot better battery because of the Oreo update. The update last year with HDR+ also made the camera better. Not to mention a general improvement in smoothness as well with Nougat and Oreo updates. My Nexus 7 kept getting better for every update as well.
You also claim iOS to be smoother, which is again wrong. Here you clearly reveal that you haven't used the Pixel or Pixel 2. Because if you did, you'd know that stock Android, or at least Pixel UI, has been smoother than iOS in general since Nougat. The rest of the garbage that OEMs deliver certainly isn’t smoother (EMUI, MIUI, LG UX, TouchWiz, Sense, etc) – but stock Android is. That is, it overall has fewer microstutters, frame drops and jitter and jank in animation and tasks than iOS. Sure, iOS is better in certain important instances, like scrolling, zooming -- the browser experience on iOS is far superior. But overall, Android is a smoother experience. I know this because I use devices on both platforms, and have been doing so for years. Hell, even TouchWiz is getting close to iOS in smoothness with the recent Samsung Experience update (which the Note 8 currently runs, and S8 will do with the Oreo update).
hescominsoon - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
I like my pixel. it is faster and smother and gets updated faster than anything Samsung offers. I do not use 99% of the "features" offered by touchwiz or (insert name of phone vendor here). Also since it is direct from Google i do not have to worry about the carrier crapware either. Samsung has finally offered direct sales so that cuts down on the carrier bloat..but There are multiple layers that still hinder Samsung updates. Not only does Samsung hae to process the base Android OS updates but also their own TW overlay and then they have to wait on facebook(oculus). All of these(plus the absolutely huge amount of phones it has out there) lead to Samsung being one of the slowest to keep their phones updated. I'll pay the price for my pixel for speedy performance, timely updates, and not having 3-4 other layers of software that add more bloat and resource usage on top of it.babadivad - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Maybe Qualcomm will get off their lazy asses and actually develop a new core now.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Good article! Main takehome for me (in addition to those already made here) is that Intel's troubles positioning their Atom chips have increased. In a laptop or 2-in-1, TDP allowances are much higher (and the batteries beefier) than for phones, so one could let all M3 cores rip , as opposed to just one. I believe this chip is also about Samsung not wanting to cede ground to Qualcomm's 835/845 in the entry-level laptop/ultralight market. We'd know for sure if Samsung and MS demo a "Windows 10 on Exynos" device. Given the trouble in Wintel land, I bet that we see such a proof of concept before the Summer.N Zaljov - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Thanks for the informative article. It's great to see you back on the grind again, Andrei. Always enjoyed your great in-depth-cover on previous articles and your efforts in the field of custom kernels.I'm really fascinated by how far SLSI pushed their custom µArch in this iteration in order to compete with Apple. I guess their custom approach finally starts to pay itself of (and I think it's also where the transistor budget of the two "missing" GPU-clusters went).
Btw: I noticed a niggly little fault in the text: "The Exynos 8890 was advertised by SLSI to run up to 2.7GHz, while the S8 limited it to 2.6GHz." - I suppose you meant S7.
krumme - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Yep. Andrei is top quality stuff.This is what makes AT great.
MrJava - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
One more correction/clarification: the two complex pipes can also execute all simple operations (arithmetic and logical instructions) like the two simple pipes.GC2:CS - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
S7 got a 2,6 Ghz turbo when using single core I think, just like S8 ?N Zaljov - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
The 8890 boosts its clockspeed (for the big cluster) to about 2.6 GHz, as long as there's load on only one or two cores. If the third core has to kick in, the clockspeed for the whole cluster gets capped to 2.3 GHz. On the 8895 though, Samsung got rid of the turbo boost, so even if there's just one Mongoose core that's fully utilized, the maximum clockspeed remains at around 2.3 GHz.GreenMeters - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Any Spectre concerns?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
We won't know for sure until it's out.But given the intrinsic nature of the Spectre vulnerability in high-performance CPU designs, and the fact that this chip needs to be shipping now for a spring phone launch, and I'm going to be surprised if Samsung had time to harden it against Spectre in hardware.
lilmoe - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
CPU designers have had a head start relative to the media though. They've known about the vulnerabilities long before. Would be interesting to know if any measures were actually taken.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
"CPU designers have had a head start relative to the media though. They've known about the vulnerabilities long before. "Note that most of that head start was used to do research on the problem and potential solutions. The actual action window for the CPU vendors was relatively short, which is a problem given the very long development cycles for CPUs.
jospoortvliet - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
even if samsung had known a month before the researchers discovered the bugs they wouldn't have been able to do much I bet. Against Meltdown MAYBE. But sure not against Spectre - it will take years before vendors release the first CPU with serious protection against it I bet. Maybe a few quick fixes in the next gen but no real solutions get - it is so fundamental to how high end CPU cores work it will need real research to find solutions that won't simply kill performance.hescominsoon - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Probably. Mot cpu road-maps are at least a year long..sometimes two. it will be interesting to see if any company is going to throw out the millions or billions in R&D to rearchitect so soon.name99 - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
The iPad is the interesting case.In principle Apple could ship updates in May or so with the A11X. But it's ALSO possible that they could simply drop that plan and ship new iPads in November or so, with an A12X. Point being that after learning about Meltdown/Spectre they used the A11X as something of a dummy, made various HW changes on it to see how they behave, and retrofitted those to the A12/A12X.
I'm not asserting that they did that, but they do have a flexibility along that dimension that pretty much no-one else has. The iPad doesn't have a hard schedule that everyone expects, and the A12X is probably designed in sync with the A12, even if it's only scheduled to be manufactured 6 months later.
Apple COULD decide (especially given their constant fsckups with macOS security) that the best way to regain some positive PR is to make a decision that the next chip they ship they can announce as being "the first CPU released that's designed to be free of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities".
lilmoe - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
You think there's a market for even faster iPads? I won't be surprised if Apple skips an upgrade cycle.name99 - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Uhh --- that's more or less what I said...phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
The Cortex-A75 is supposed to be vulnerable to the same Meltdown issue add Intel CPUs, according to ARM. Will be interesting to see if any of the devices using A75s or derivatives like Samsung M3 or the Kyro cores in the SD845 will be patched from the get-go. Or will we be waiting on Google to develop Android patches?jospoortvliet - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
I dont think this is an ARM derivative and while it accidentally might be resistant go meltdown it will 99.983% sure be vulnerable to all Spectre variants. I leave the tiny bit for the super small chance it is slightly less vulnerable to one or another spectre type issue.jjj - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Why are you assuming that Samsung will use Snapdragon?When they had a far better chip (SD810 times), they did not and now Samsung is likely to lose Qualcomm as a foundry customer too so, has Qualcomm hinted that Samsung is a customer for SD845?
Do hope they got single core turbo this time around, doesn't seem feasible to go with such a core at such clocks otherwise.
jjj - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
I suppose there is that one GB result of a Samsung with SD845.ZolaIII - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Well they (Samsung) still don't have better GPU which maters a lot, Adrenos are 2x more efficient compared to last MALI. Other than that they can't sell with their LTE modems globally... The good thing about this with both Samsung and Apple is that QC now won't have a chance & will bring its new (gen) ARM server based CPU's to mobile SoC's and beyond.jjj - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
On the GPU side, they've been hiding the differences pretty well so far and no reason to expect a change there.This cycle they should be able to cover all markets with their modem as even the lower end 7872 has CDMA. Qualcomm's server core is likely not all that different from Kryo and we don't want that.
Johnny smitthys - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
The GPU matters least actually. The one in SD810 is more than enough for a 4K display.There is waste of power in SOC's on GPU side actually.grahaman27 - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
I think there is evidence Samsung will use qualcomm. The leaks indicate it."The downside is ET News says SLP will only be used in Exynos versions of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus and an archaic licensing agreement with Qualcomm forbids Samsung from shipping Exynos-based smartphones to the U.S. Instead"
name99 - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
"SLSI’s claim of doubling single-threaded performance does not seem farfetched at all."Except that what it takes to boost IPC by 50% is not really covered at all by these visible changes -- same problem as Apple :-(
For example we know nothing about
- quality of the branch prediction
- quality of the prefetchers and cache placement algorithms
- what instruction fusion is being provided?
- how aggressive are the load/store queues (eg was the Moshovos patent licensed?)
- quality of the memory controller (eg seems to be have MASSIVELY improved in the A11 to better than Intel levels)
- etc
I'd say that all we see here is the possibility that Samsung could hit 50%, not proof that they are likely to have done so. I'm guessing that can't have improved as much as necessary in one year across all the areas I list above. (Certainly the "leaks" [probably faked...] for the GB4 scores aren't especially ambitious, giving only 2422!)
Just to be clear here, let's say that we want to see IPC increased by 50% across GB4 single-threaded. Multi-core is uninteresting, and spare us the rants about how some other benchmark (which conveniently has no iOS numbers available) is somehow magically better.
[And yeah, we'd all like to see SPEC2006 numbers for Apple. Hell we'd like to also see them for the iPhone7 ... But until they arrive, GB4 is the best we have.]
Raqia - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
We do have some SPEC2006 numbers for Apple architectures but I believe these were compiled w/ GCC rather than LLVM.https://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad...
name99 - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Those are A9X numbers. Two generations old.My point was that, for a site that's (according to some commenters) supposed to be all Apple love all the time, the iPhone 7 deep dive was never delivered, and the iPhone 8/X deep dive also seems to be MIA.
id4andrei - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Whatever Apple scores it doesn't matter because it is unsustainable; the chip is too big and power hungry. The iphone 7 literally cannot sustain its own SoC performance and resorts to throttling after just one year or less. For three generations(possibly 4 with the x and the 8) Apple has been selling flawed devices to unsuspecting consumers. They pulled a "dieselgate" right under the nose of everyone.GC2:CS - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
They can’t sustain CPU perf because of battery ?And why nobody cares about GPU, which plays worse on the battery than the CPU ?
Is it a batch of faulty batteries or Apple is trying to extend the battery endurance a bit ?
People just went nuts on this “issue”, far overblown like everything that has something to do with Apple. It’s planed obsolence, crap chip design. Who does believe that Apple with their intel swallowing desire to make powerful silicon designed a chip their phone cannot power ?
I think that is bad lokk at the problematic. They designed a chip for a phone not in reverse.
id4andrei - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
A smartphone that cannot sustain its own performance is a flawed device. 50% throttle is not a feature, it is a band-aid aiming to avoid a total recall. We are talking about year old devices that get throttled with batteries that pass Apple's own diagnostics. No smartphone, laptop, tablet on this planet acts this way. It's the battery life that gets shorter and not the performance kneecapped.Around the 2 year mark, coincidently when the warranty expires(in Europe) the phone is throttled into oblivion. Directly, or indirectly if you wish, this IS planned obsolescence.
thunng8 - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
Throttle in 1 year? The 3 a10 devices in my household which are 15 months old hasn’t throttled and the a9 which is more than 2 years old hasn’t either.thunng8 - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
Not saying some users have seen throttling, but I have not seen in any phones that I have access to say so saying a blanket statement of throttle after 1 year and useless after 2 is ridiculous.id4andrei - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
The so called "fix" perhaps fleshes out the weaker combos. Your devices were less susceptible as they happened to have a sturdier battery.It's not useless per se, just a 40%-50% permanent penalty. All concealed, gaming warranty or insurance conditions. This is a cover up that plays exactly into planned obsolescence. Directly or indirectly, this is the effect.
thunng8 - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Like I said no penalty for my sisters 6s Plus which is close to 2.5 years old.I did tell her to get the battery replaced sometime this year as it’s cheap and she’ll be able to use it for at least another 2 years if not more.
NetMage - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
So apparently all Android phones that throttle after 30 seconds should never have been sold ?name99 - Monday, February 19, 2018 - link
The GB4 numbers suggest that Samsung did indeed pull it off --- Integer IPC about 50% higher, so about A10 levels, and FP IPC (which is easier to boost) about90% higher, again A10 levels. Very impressive!In my defense at least part of that is surely due to precisely the various items I said were not covered by the article, from uncore (prefetch and cache quality) to front-end.
From recent LLVM activity we DO know, for example, that Samsung has become much more aggressive about instruction pairs they are willing to fuse (beyond the literals and compare+branch, they now have AES fusion, arithmetic followed by compare, and compare followed by selection).
Fusion is a great way to amplify the performance of your queues, and I think there still remains some performance to be squeezed out of fusion (especially now fusion of three successive instruction in the form of what are sometime called "chains"). Meaning that (IMHO) I don't see A11 levels of performance as the end of the road --- I expect Apple still to make meaningful improvement in bothe the A12 and A13. And it's nice to see that Samsung will likely be alongside them -- perhaps lagging by twelve to eighteen months, but providing enough pressure to keep Apple going.
(As for Intel which is already about 30% behind Apple in IPC, well...
I think in the Apple community we all pretty much hope that Samsung will move soon to shipping Exynos in laptops, putting more pressure for Apple to do the same, and soon enough [by 2020?] transitioning the Mac off x86.)
name99 - Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - link
Hmm. The full tests now https://www.anandtech.com/show/12520/the-galaxy-s9...suggest that my first instincts were correct, Samsung did NOT pull it off.
It's a shame we (still...) don't have comparable Apple numbers (eg SPEC2006) but both browser numbers and my tests regarding Wolfram Player suggest that Apple's performance advantage is broad and real, not limited to Geekbench.
As for Samsung? Did they optimize all structures ONLY for Geekbench? Do they run GB at unsustainable frequencies (ie good old fashioned benchmark detector cheating)? Or the slightly more subtle "run at frequencies that are stupid in terms of the energy/time tradeoff"?
Do they have a truly lousy DVFS scheduler?
Wardrive86 - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Excellent article again, thank you! That core diagram is beautiful -heart eyes-. I hope the drivers for their GPU has been enhanced as much as this CPU core has. Can't wait to see how it compares to the A75/Kryo 385Ej24 - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Can someone elaborate why Samsung doesn't equip US devices with exynos soc's? They did on the galaxy S6 and even used their own in house Shannon lte modem. The only reason I've read that they use Qualcomm in the US is because of the integrated modem in the snapdragon soc but it's clearly not necessary as the S6 stands testament to.N Zaljov - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
The S6 was equipped with the Exynos 7420, which was only an AP, which means that it didn't have an integrated baseband processor. In Europe, the 7420 was combined with an external Shannon 333 baseband, whereas the NA version (and I also think the Chinese...) was equipped with an external Qualcomm MDM9635 BB.Since the 889x-series has it's own fully integrated BB processor, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to combine it with an external BB processor, when Samsung can just use an SoC that has all the demanded functionality on board while delivering equal performance figures. But we'll see how that changes with the 9810, which I believe will be the turning point for SLSI (look at the recently announced Meizu phone, which has an Exynos with " CDMA support a couple of days ago...).
N Zaljov - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
*its own fully integratedThe eternal need of an edit button is real. |-D
StormyParis - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
Very interesting read, thank you. Now for the benchmarks ;-piwod - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
This is one reason I believe Apple will never Fab with Samsung again. Hence I dont understand why the Analyst and Internet keep bumping out fake news.How far is M3 from Apple's A11 in Single Thread Performance? I mean projected numbers.
Does it mean Samsung could possibly have Windows 10 laptop running ARM using its own chip?
id4andrei - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
As long as Exynos(and Snapdragon for that matter) are smaller in die size for the same process node they will never reach Apple's single-threaded performance. That's not a bad thing because:1. Smartphones are powerful enough for average daily usage.
2. Apple's performance is not sustainable as we've seen from the throttling fiasco.
onfire23 - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Is this Andrei frumasanu the same guy known as andreilux in the xda. Fantastic kernel dev, made my s3 very usablearsjum - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
Yes, he is.lmcd - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
ARM A75 is supposed to be knocked down a peg with its inevitable Meltdown patch, no?Wardrive86 - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
This is a honest to goodness big fat core! Will it out perform A75? I'm not so sure, it seems to be bigger than A75, in many of the same proportions that Mongoose 2 was to A73/Kryo 280. As we've recently seen they performed roughly the same only with substantial differences in power consumption and efficiency. Granted Mongoose 3 has alot of execution units, and a 228 entry RoB, the branch predictor accuracy must be insane!ricky89 - Sunday, April 15, 2018 - link
When will we see this super powerful processor on a smartphone?