It seems perfectly competitive in the graphics benchmarks, and comparing JavaScript benchmarks across different hardware, OS, and browser configurations is useless. To say Apple's Safari team "aggressively optimizes" for Octane and Kraken would be an understatement. Plus we're talking about simple benchmarks that can barely make any use of a second processor core, so of course they make the A9's dual-core CPU design look good next to more parallel competitors. Run something like Geekbench MT or the 3DMark physics test and watch A9 lose out to even Exynos 7420 or SD 810.
Doesn't everyone optimize for benchmarks? Given that Samsung, HTC and co were caught optimizing for benchmark results just last year I'm not gonna put that as a negative for Apple against Samsung SoCs, at best they both do it in the same way.
By OEMs getting optimized do you mean simply not throttling the SOCs when running the benchmark? lowlymarine was talking about optimizing the software. As for the SOCs a fast dual will always be faster than a fast quad unless it's a parallel workload.
And how many real world mobile apps really take advantage of multiple cores? Hardly any. Hate on Apple but their SoC design is still the best overall one around IMO. These 8 core designs are still more for PR than real world use.
You don't seem to understand the difference between "scheduling" threads across multiple cores and actually "utilizing" those cores.
All that article shows is that Android will "schedule" threads across cores that are available (which is no surprise as any multi-threaded OS can do this).
For an App to actually "utilize" multiple cores it would need to divide it's workload among threads such that every core is running at 100% getting work done. This is very hard to do in the real world and why most Apps don't actually fully utilize those cores.
"The fact that Chrome and to a lesser extent Samsung's stock browser were able to consistently load up to 6-8 concurrent processes while loading a page suddenly gives a lot of credence to these 8-core designs that we would have otherwise not thought of being able to fully use their designed CPU configurations. In terms of pure computational load, web-page rendering remains as one of the heaviest tasks on a smartphone so it's very encouraging to see that today's web rendering engines are able to make good use of parallelization to spread the load between the available CPU cores."
Yes, but that's one app. An app that sees more development effort than any other, I believe. I think if you monitor most apps you'll see that they're mostly lightly threaded at best.
Its the one app that matters. Its the one app people uses alle the time, and its by far the one that uses most cpu ressources. Who cares if calling or music is single threaded or not? Browsing is what matters for 99,9% of users and if any future games need more cpu grunt they will use Vulcan anyway and thereby easy access to better threading.
You're completely missing the point. Loading up concurrent threads in no way means that each of those threads is doing an equal amount of work or that each of those threads are actually using the full processing power of an individual core.
It's very easy to divide your program up into multiple threads to distribute the workload. It's very difficult to make sure that all those threads are doing an equal amount of work all of the time (no thread finishes early and then sits idle, for example). My original comment still stands.
You're not wrong, but simply having the ability to schedule those tasks across a big SOC makes for a more responsive system, all else being equal...but since things aren't equal you can also get a somewhat similar experience with fewer, much more powerful cores. Imho, exynos is doing something pretty interesting this year with allowing "turbo" modes for lightly threaded, but highly resident, loads. OTOH, snapdragon seems to have a pretty strong IPC advantage given there benchmarks, thus far, but we'll have to wait and see if they are sufficiently powerful enough to provide a good experience with half the cores.
It's an advanced big.LITTLE configuration. It can handle well-threaded and single-threaded loads equally well, multitasks well, and has good efficiency and performance. Then again the 820 has Kryo cores and they probably kick butt in a lot of scenarios too.
Reference. Synthetic or not they are "reliable" and provide a point of reference for the tested device. This is the purpose of any benchmark regardless what area we're talking about. That is even what the word actually means. You get several known points of reference and all devices will be compared against those. Then you can find a way to map them as a subjective experience for real life applications.
Would you settle for a graph where some guy just gives a subjective mark for the experience with the phone? I assume any flagship would be a 9ish. There you go, now you don't have to waste time reading these articles. :)
Most are not reliable,that's the problem. But you seem rather confused,as it appears you think that there are only 2 choices, synthetic with no relevance and subjective opinions with no data. Some synthetic benchmarks are ok or better but the bulk of the benchmarks should not be synthetic , just like it has been in PC for a long long time. In mobile testing everybody is just being lazy.
Sure, they're very reliable when testing different CPUs with the SAME browser, under the SAME OS/Kernel.
They're good to measure how much the GS7 improved compared the GS6 running the same browser running the same version of Android. They're good to show how much the iPhone 6S compared to the iPhone 6 when both are running the same version of iOS and Safari.
OR, they're good to show how much faster a certain browser is over another running on the SAME hardware and OS.
Outside these use cases, they're completely and utterly useless.
They're be reliable IF THEY USED THE EXACT SAME BROWSER REACH TIME. As it is, it's impossible to tell if changes are due to hardware or browser optimizations.
Andrei's comments on LG G5 and Samsung S7 running warm is a problem typically expected from flagship Android phones trying to compete with Apple iPhone 6s. Heat pipes in a smartphone is a definite sign of thermal issues. Anyway I think the Android flagships are still struggling to get close to iPhone 6s on CPU while S820 beats it in GPU workloads.
I expect some serious improvements in the A10 chip. Apple's cores are begging for SMT to better utilize their massive CPU cores's execution resources. TSMC InFO packaging is expected to bring lower power with smaller area. the iPhone with A10 will blow past the Android flagships and will be tough to beat at the 16/14nm FINFET node next year. We have to see if Samsung beats Apple to 10nm node. If that happens the S8 should be a big step up and the A11 built at TSMC 10nm will come 6 months later to continue the contest at 10nm node.
Erm... The A9 was beat by the 7420 before it even came out. This cute talk about single threaded performance being the most important factor in MOBILE is nothing but BS. The iPhone 6S major performance improvements over the previous iPhone came from storage speed. Even with that, the S6 wasn't faster at loading apps or webpages compared to the GS6 (among other 2015 Android flagships).
The most processor demanding task 90%+ of users will need is encoding video for sharing, and that takes full advantage of multi-cores (more efficiently so on more cores at that).
For gaming it's all about GPUs. GPUs are ALL about efficiency at this point, not speed. No game can saturate the A9's GPU, and neither the Adreno 430 or Mali T760 MP8. By the time there are games that can, it would already be 2-3 years in.
Let the single-threaded argument go, people. Smartphones aren't the biggest gainers of that aspect of CPU performance.
Sure. And we all know that loading of Apps is the single most important aspect of a device. That's why all the reputable sites (like Anandtech) do extensive App-Loading Benchmark tests rather than benchmarks that test the actual CPU/GPU.
Yea, cool browser benchmarks, stress tests, and lots of completely irrelevant, unproven tests that have absolutely no value in real world usage. Keep'em comin'.
All these "reputable" sites are confusing PC and workstation benchmarking with mobile. Here's a tip: the keyword is *efficiency*. At least some of these sites are starting to get a clue.
"Let the single-threaded argument go, people." No. Single threaded performance is still extremely important. It's the reason that JS heavy webpages load much better on an iPhone. Haven't you read the JS perf posts by discourse.org?
I would definitely prefer my Nexus 6P had the A9 chip. Apple's 2 core trounces on Qualcomm's octacore.
I can't post the link, as it triggers the spam filters, but search for 'discourse js performance' They basically say that their JS heavy site is nearly unusable on Android. They're even evaluating their future site because of Android's popularity.
"It's the reason that JS heavy webpages load much better on an iPhone." No, the reason that JS heavy webpages load much faster on an iPhone is that Chrome for ARM sucks. I have a friend with a ZenFone 2 (Intel Atom Z3580) and Chrome on it is drastically more fluid than on my Note 5. Similar comparisons are easily drawn with ARM Chromebooks next to their Intel-powered brethren.
@lowlymarine: "No, the reason that JS heavy webpages load much faster on an iPhone is that Chrome for ARM sucks. I have a friend with a ZenFone 2 (Intel Atom Z3580) and Chrome on it is drastically more fluid than on my Note 5. Similar comparisons are easily drawn with ARM Chromebooks next to their Intel-powered brethren."
You may be correct. Though to be fair, your example doesn't prove it. Intel's Atom architecture has pretty solid single threaded performance relative to its ARM competitors. So, it could be the software, but it could also be the single threaded performance. I'd assume a little of both.
That doesn't prove that Chrome for ARM is unoptimized. Intel processors have excellent cache and memory subsystems, fantastic branch misprediction and are deeply OoO. They are much better at these things than general ARM processors. These are also things that you can't measure with useless benchmarks like Geekbench because these can fully reside in the L1 cache.
We're talking about Silvermont here, not Skylake. It hardly has notably superior cache, memory subsystems or branch prediction compared to the Cortex-A57 in Note 5 and it's much less deeply OoO.
Geekbench is also very far from fully residing in L1 cache, it's not Dhrystone.
Oh look, a logical fallacy. Shift the burden of proof to others and ask them to provide the evidence to counter your claims instead of proving them yourself.
The A9 absolutely TROUNCES the 7420 in single core performance and they are essentially equal in multi core.
"Let the single-threaded argument go, people".
Spoken like someone on the losing end of single core performance who's desperately trying to justify having multiple cores when most of the software they use can't even take advantage of them.
Sorry, but I write code. It is very difficult (outside of benchmarks or certain special use cases) to divide your code into threads and have each of those threads doing an equal amount of work. A thread running on a separate core that's sitting idle much of the time (say a thread monitoring the touchscreen for input) isn't properly utilizing that core at all.
The A9 absolutely TROUNCES the 7420 in single core and they are almost identical in multi core.
Considering the majority of software can't even utilize multiple cores effectively it's the single core tests that are the most important.
"Let the single-threaded argument go,. people" Spoken like someone trying to justify their mega-core device that doesn't even perform as good as a 2 core iPhone.
Whatever happened to having a civil discussion on Anandtech? Of course a larger core is going to outperform smaller ones. I also don't know much about the software of iOS, but I assume it is a bit more efficient as well, which skews the performance numbers in the iPhone's favor. The A9 is a great chip, but pretty sure the s820 and Exynos 8890 have caught up to its performance numbers (the a9 is clocked much lower though). Remember that Apple is almost a year ahead of the rest when it comes to SoCs and phones; I see people comparing the S7 edge to the yet to be released iPhone 7, but it is meant to compete with the iPhone 6S, as those are the phones of the same generation.
@Toss3: "Of course a larger core is going to outperform smaller ones. I also don't know much about the software of iOS, but I assume it is a bit more efficient as well, which skews the performance numbers in the iPhone's favor."
Apple controls the hardware and software in the browser benchmarks. It is entirely plausible that they would gear their browser to take advantage of their heavy single threaded performance. In the end, this would help their end user experience as well, so I think we can take this as an assumed. Of course, that doesn't take away from the expectation that (assuming equally competent designers and process node) a larger core should outperform a smaller one in single threaded applications given its greater resources.
Others have said this, but it bears repeating. Huge differences in benchmarks can be seen on different platforms, browsers, or even configurations of the same browser. These differences exist for various reasons. To be sure, some are trying to game benchmarks. However, some are legitimately targeting a different aspect of the end user experience than the benchmark in question. Of course, some are just lazy or outdated. Conclusion, javascript benchmarks (or any benchmark that is extremely software/platform dependent) are a bad way to make conclusions about hardware as too many variables remain uncontrolled for proper testing. Now if you had the same OS, browser (including version), and configuration, there may be some merit as those variables are controlled. That simply isn't going to happen while Apple and Android make use of mutually exclusive hardware and operating systems.
I do not quite understand why some people overemphasize the importance of single threaded performance when most of the tasks that really need the performance (gaming, image processing, compression, encryption etc.) are all perfectly multi-theadable. The trade off between having the highest performance when it does not matter (A9) vs having it when it actually matters (7420) seems to be pretty simple. Did you notice that Apple stopped using single/dual core CPUs on their laptops long ago. Why is that?
Gaming has actually been notoriously bound by single threaded performance. That's part of why DX12/Metal/Vulkan is such a big thing. Reducing CPU costs and increasing parallelism to eliminate the current CPU bottleneck on the main render core. This is also going to be critical for VR where today single threaded performance is critical for render latency.
Image processing is a good example of something that is too easily parallelized. It's best to use a GPU as a result for long running image manipulations. Compression and Encryption while potentially good choices, are best implemented by hardware offloads rather than a CPU.
No I did not notice Apple stopped using dual cores... because they didn't. The vast majority of what they sell is dual. The Macbook 12", MBA 11", MBA 13", Macbook Pro 13", entry level iMac, and every Mac Mini is a dual core. The only quad core laptop is the Macbook Pro 15".
Not only that but Apple makes the A9X in the iPad Pro. They could have easily made it a lower clocked quad core but instead made 2 high speed cores. They spent die space on cache and GPU rather than CPU cores. Because single threaded CPU performance really is that important.
Oh, I also wouldn't judge units on display if I were you.
1) they've been kneaded like crazy from various people. who knows who did what. 2) That persistent, powerhog showroom/presentation software mode is on, which significantly slows down the device.
They did say this in the article: "We haven't had the opportunity to benchmark the Snapdragon 820 Galaxy S7 yet, therefore I included the score numbers of the MDP/S platform to represent a best-case scenario for the Snapdragon 820 until we can get apples-to-apples scores based on Samsung's browser". We also have some benchmarks of the G5 already, and the s820 seems to be a top-performer!
Apple's SoCs are benchmark beasts but perform roughly the same in non-bench apps and browsing. The new chip is always touted as being XX% faster over last year's model but the only tangible differences are in benchmark apps.
Android has so much crap going on at any given time, the extra power is noticable in almost everything.
So the difference will be made by power and thermal. That MP12 got to throttle hard. Hope SD820 GPU perf drops by some 40% and this the 8990 not much worse.
It would be great if you could downclock the CPU in gaming and see if you can get better framerates. Got the feeling thermal management could be better on the CPU side in gaming - ofc that would vary by game.
Why do you think the MP12 will throttle hard? If anything it will throttle less than the MP8 in the 7420, better process, lower clocks, etc will make it produce less power. Running at lower clockspeed is more efficient because you get to lower voltage. They specifically widened it out so they could run it more efficiently so that it would NOT throttle.
The Exynos 7420 is using an older gen GPU and a direct comparison is not ideal. MPX means X cores, just saying to make sure you know that. The Exynos 7420 was dropping in perf some 50%. and was T760MP8 on 14LPE. Here you got T880MP12 on 14LPP and the process is just a bit better. We do know that Huawei has T880MP4 at 900MHz on 16ff+ so 3 times smaller GPU at 38% higher clocks and it throttles very little. We could do some math based on that but that would mean that we are assuming the same TDP for all else and all else is using quite a lot of power and with diff cores and diff clocks we just can't assume that all else will be equal.The max TDP of the device will likely differ too, the S7 does have a heatpipe. All in all it is pretty hard to be sure how much it will throttle, the CPU and memory controller will matter a lot but it is very likely that there will be some hard throttling , i hope not more than 40% but maybe with some luck it's 30%. Mali T880 does have some neat memory bandwidth saving feature and ,in theory, they could do a better job than in the past at managing the CPU during gaming. The past and this remark here that the LG G5 and the S7 do get rather hot are not good signs.
Hope Adreno 530 throttles some 40% and not more, guess my phrasing wasn't ideal. After last year i'm happy if it's only 40%.. Additionally, i see the resulting perf as ok for 1440p in actual gaming, not 60FPS but at least above 30FPS and significantly better than what the Exynos 7420 delivered last year.. If the throttling would be more than 40% it wouldn't be much fun. I am just being cautious and keeping my expectations low.
That's quite reasonable. We'll have to see what arch changes they made (I don't think they were significant based on a quick look at the freedreno drm) and if the new node is enough to offset the greater performance.
These benchmarks mean nothing. When I bought Note 4 it gave twice the ONscreen score of my previous phone GS4. But when it came to games... I was just surprised to see GS4 suprassing a lot faster Note on paper.
Thanks for the short but informative Exynos 8 warp up, Andrei! Another question (although nobody except me will seriously care about it): Do you know the exact kernel-version used for the Exynos 8890 BSP? All i do know, is that Qualcomm relies on 3.18.20 for their msm8996 BSP.
If I'm not mistaken then it's because they they lack the IP rights to build their own modem for the US market and they are pretty much forced to use Qualcomm's CPU if they want a Qualcomm modem due to Qualcomms pricing scheme.
Nope, the Galaxy S6 lines and the Note 5 all used a complete Samsung Chipset, the 7420 AP, plus the Shannon 333 modem.
I mean, the Qualcomm modem is better, but yeah, I agree with the OP, I don;t see why they really do this, unless they are just trying to remain friendly with Qualcomm...?
Boy, sure is a bit disappointing that we will not see the 8890 in the US. Not that I have anything against the 820, but there are plenty of other phones that will be available with it, but I doubt we will see thee 8890 in anything :(.
I really think Qualcomm should have gone with more cores. Either go with 6 Kry cores, or put some A53 or even A35's in there. As it stands, it really falls behind in MP performance, which actually does matter to some degree.
The bottom line seems to be that the Apple chips are vastly superior (we're talking a generation, maybe more) ahead in single threaded CPU performance.
This is something that Android SOC designers need to work on - big time. We're talking a gap on the order of 2580-30% here, and when the A10 comes out, it will probably be something on the order of 50-75%.
There is also the fact that Apple's chips probably run cooler too - I'd love to see a performance per watt in single threaded comparison. It won't be pretty for Android I bet. (Oh and just so you know, I'm far from an Apple fan).
We need more information here, but between the Exynos 8890 and the Snapdragon 820, I'd rather have the 820.
- It is looking (from the limited info we have) like the 820 has a stronger GPU - Exynos means zero chance of custom ROMs based on AOSP
Although there is some OS scheduling, I don't think that all 4 cores can be used effectively right now.
Again too early to tell and we need to see if either chip throttles in real life.
Since when is going with fewer cores more advanced? Apple has 2 big cores and less efficient in both perf and power. Crippled multitasking and battery life because of it. Nobody tests battery life anywhere close to proper . Users have at least a few apps that are always lurking in the background and draining resources and that's a lot more damaging on 2 big cores than on bigLITTLE. Apple keeps it dumb and simple and costly. That's not ahead, it's 5 years behind.
What's your basis for saying that the a9 is "less efficient in both perf and power"? It seems to be really good at racing to idle despite having a lower clock than many (all?) of the Android flagships.
What your all forgetting is that i wouldnt be seen dead with an iPhone. the 6S battery is shocking and the restricted experience doesnt come close to Android. 6S plus is like a paving slab and is ugly as hell and the 6s has a crappy low res screen. Seriously dont care about mobile CPU for 2 years now as they are all rapid!
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zeeBomb - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Andrei delivered! I'm hyped! *Rubs hands together*Eddytion - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
It's sad how it can't still compete with last years iPhone in terms of benchmarks...lowlymarine - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
It seems perfectly competitive in the graphics benchmarks, and comparing JavaScript benchmarks across different hardware, OS, and browser configurations is useless. To say Apple's Safari team "aggressively optimizes" for Octane and Kraken would be an understatement. Plus we're talking about simple benchmarks that can barely make any use of a second processor core, so of course they make the A9's dual-core CPU design look good next to more parallel competitors. Run something like Geekbench MT or the 3DMark physics test and watch A9 lose out to even Exynos 7420 or SD 810.GodHatesFAQs - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Doesn't everyone optimize for benchmarks? Given that Samsung, HTC and co were caught optimizing for benchmark results just last year I'm not gonna put that as a negative for Apple against Samsung SoCs, at best they both do it in the same way.Schmich - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
By OEMs getting optimized do you mean simply not throttling the SOCs when running the benchmark? lowlymarine was talking about optimizing the software. As for the SOCs a fast dual will always be faster than a fast quad unless it's a parallel workload.Ironchef3500 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Nice nickname...Jumangi - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
And how many real world mobile apps really take advantage of multiple cores? Hardly any. Hate on Apple but their SoC design is still the best overall one around IMO. These 8 core designs are still more for PR than real world use.T1beriu - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
tl;dr: All apps.You must have missed this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9518/the-mobile-cpu-...
ciderrules - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
You don't seem to understand the difference between "scheduling" threads across multiple cores and actually "utilizing" those cores.All that article shows is that Android will "schedule" threads across cores that are available (which is no surprise as any multi-threaded OS can do this).
For an App to actually "utilize" multiple cores it would need to divide it's workload among threads such that every core is running at 100% getting work done. This is very hard to do in the real world and why most Apps don't actually fully utilize those cores.
krumme - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
"The fact that Chrome and to a lesser extent Samsung's stock browser were able to consistently load up to 6-8 concurrent processes while loading a page suddenly gives a lot of credence to these 8-core designs that we would have otherwise not thought of being able to fully use their designed CPU configurations. In terms of pure computational load, web-page rendering remains as one of the heaviest tasks on a smartphone so it's very encouraging to see that today's web rendering engines are able to make good use of parallelization to spread the load between the available CPU cores."tuxRoller - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Yes, but that's one app. An app that sees more development effort than any other, I believe.I think if you monitor most apps you'll see that they're mostly lightly threaded at best.
krumme - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
Its the one app that matters. Its the one app people uses alle the time, and its by far the one that uses most cpu ressources.Who cares if calling or music is single threaded or not? Browsing is what matters for 99,9% of users and if any future games need more cpu grunt they will use Vulcan anyway and thereby easy access to better threading.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Way to move the goalposts.Any other ad hoc preconditions I should know about?
ciderrules - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
You're completely missing the point. Loading up concurrent threads in no way means that each of those threads is doing an equal amount of work or that each of those threads are actually using the full processing power of an individual core.It's very easy to divide your program up into multiple threads to distribute the workload. It's very difficult to make sure that all those threads are doing an equal amount of work all of the time (no thread finishes early and then sits idle, for example). My original comment still stands.
lilmoe - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Oblivious at its best.tuxRoller - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
You're not wrong, but simply having the ability to schedule those tasks across a big SOC makes for a more responsive system, all else being equal...but since things aren't equal you can also get a somewhat similar experience with fewer, much more powerful cores.Imho, exynos is doing something pretty interesting this year with allowing "turbo" modes for lightly threaded, but highly resident, loads. OTOH, snapdragon seems to have a pretty strong IPC advantage given there benchmarks, thus far, but we'll have to wait and see if they are sufficiently powerful enough to provide a good experience with half the cores.
Alexvrb - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
It's an advanced big.LITTLE configuration. It can handle well-threaded and single-threaded loads equally well, multitasks well, and has good efficiency and performance. Then again the 820 has Kryo cores and they probably kick butt in a lot of scenarios too.jjj - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Indeed these benchmark apps are just sad.It's increasingly frustrating to keep seeing pointless synthetic benchmarks.
Bhairava - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
I wonder why Anandtech keeps on using Octane and Kraken. Rethorical question.close - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Reference. Synthetic or not they are "reliable" and provide a point of reference for the tested device. This is the purpose of any benchmark regardless what area we're talking about. That is even what the word actually means. You get several known points of reference and all devices will be compared against those. Then you can find a way to map them as a subjective experience for real life applications.Would you settle for a graph where some guy just gives a subjective mark for the experience with the phone? I assume any flagship would be a 9ish. There you go, now you don't have to waste time reading these articles. :)
jjj - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Most are not reliable,that's the problem.But you seem rather confused,as it appears you think that there are only 2 choices, synthetic with no relevance and subjective opinions with no data.
Some synthetic benchmarks are ok or better but the bulk of the benchmarks should not be synthetic , just like it has been in PC for a long long time. In mobile testing everybody is just being lazy.
lilmoe - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Sure, they're very reliable when testing different CPUs with the SAME browser, under the SAME OS/Kernel.They're good to measure how much the GS7 improved compared the GS6 running the same browser running the same version of Android. They're good to show how much the iPhone 6S compared to the iPhone 6 when both are running the same version of iOS and Safari.
OR, they're good to show how much faster a certain browser is over another running on the SAME hardware and OS.
Outside these use cases, they're completely and utterly useless.
ddriver - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
"Outside these use cases, they're completely and utterly useless."Nothing that makes apple products appear unrealistically good is utterly useless on AT.
tuxRoller - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
They're be reliable IF THEY USED THE EXACT SAME BROWSER REACH TIME. As it is, it's impossible to tell if changes are due to hardware or browser optimizations.ddriver - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
That's just a matter of professionalism and the lack of it :)Meteor2 - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
So how should they compare platforms?Ironchef3500 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I had the exact same thought...hailey14 - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Typo at the table. 4x [email protected] must be 4x [email protected].Great article as always!
lilmoe - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Steal it! Steal it, Andrei! Ask Josh to do the same.raghu78 - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Andrei's comments on LG G5 and Samsung S7 running warm is a problem typically expected from flagship Android phones trying to compete with Apple iPhone 6s. Heat pipes in a smartphone is a definite sign of thermal issues. Anyway I think the Android flagships are still struggling to get close to iPhone 6s on CPU while S820 beats it in GPU workloads.I expect some serious improvements in the A10 chip. Apple's cores are begging for SMT to better utilize their massive CPU cores's execution resources. TSMC InFO packaging is expected to bring lower power with smaller area. the iPhone with A10 will blow past the Android flagships and will be tough to beat at the 16/14nm FINFET node next year. We have to see if Samsung beats Apple to 10nm node. If that happens the S8 should be a big step up and the A11 built at TSMC 10nm will come 6 months later to continue the contest at 10nm node.
lilmoe - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Erm... The A9 was beat by the 7420 before it even came out.This cute talk about single threaded performance being the most important factor in MOBILE is nothing but BS. The iPhone 6S major performance improvements over the previous iPhone came from storage speed. Even with that, the S6 wasn't faster at loading apps or webpages compared to the GS6 (among other 2015 Android flagships).
The most processor demanding task 90%+ of users will need is encoding video for sharing, and that takes full advantage of multi-cores (more efficiently so on more cores at that).
For gaming it's all about GPUs. GPUs are ALL about efficiency at this point, not speed. No game can saturate the A9's GPU, and neither the Adreno 430 or Mali T760 MP8. By the time there are games that can, it would already be 2-3 years in.
Let the single-threaded argument go, people. Smartphones aren't the biggest gainers of that aspect of CPU performance.
lilmoe - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
****Even with that, the iPhone 6S wasn't faster at loading apps or webpages compared to the GS6EDIT BUTTON FFS.
ciderrules - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Sure. And we all know that loading of Apps is the single most important aspect of a device. That's why all the reputable sites (like Anandtech) do extensive App-Loading Benchmark tests rather than benchmarks that test the actual CPU/GPU.lilmoe - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Yea, cool browser benchmarks, stress tests, and lots of completely irrelevant, unproven tests that have absolutely no value in real world usage. Keep'em comin'.All these "reputable" sites are confusing PC and workstation benchmarking with mobile. Here's a tip: the keyword is *efficiency*. At least some of these sites are starting to get a clue.
syxbit - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
"Let the single-threaded argument go, people."No.
Single threaded performance is still extremely important. It's the reason that JS heavy webpages load much better on an iPhone. Haven't you read the JS perf posts by discourse.org?
I would definitely prefer my Nexus 6P had the A9 chip. Apple's 2 core trounces on Qualcomm's octacore.
Chaser - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
And how does the average user experience the difference routinely?syxbit - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
I can't post the link, as it triggers the spam filters, but search for 'discourse js performance'They basically say that their JS heavy site is nearly unusable on Android. They're even evaluating their future site because of Android's popularity.
beginner99 - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Discourse is also a terrible platform. It's even slow on a desktop compared to other options that fill the same niche.lowlymarine - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
"It's the reason that JS heavy webpages load much better on an iPhone."No, the reason that JS heavy webpages load much faster on an iPhone is that Chrome for ARM sucks. I have a friend with a ZenFone 2 (Intel Atom Z3580) and Chrome on it is drastically more fluid than on my Note 5. Similar comparisons are easily drawn with ARM Chromebooks next to their Intel-powered brethren.
BurntMyBacon - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
@lowlymarine: "No, the reason that JS heavy webpages load much faster on an iPhone is that Chrome for ARM sucks. I have a friend with a ZenFone 2 (Intel Atom Z3580) and Chrome on it is drastically more fluid than on my Note 5. Similar comparisons are easily drawn with ARM Chromebooks next to their Intel-powered brethren."You may be correct. Though to be fair, your example doesn't prove it. Intel's Atom architecture has pretty solid single threaded performance relative to its ARM competitors. So, it could be the software, but it could also be the single threaded performance. I'd assume a little of both.
milli - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
That doesn't prove that Chrome for ARM is unoptimized.Intel processors have excellent cache and memory subsystems, fantastic branch misprediction and are deeply OoO. They are much better at these things than general ARM processors.
These are also things that you can't measure with useless benchmarks like Geekbench because these can fully reside in the L1 cache.
Exophase - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
We're talking about Silvermont here, not Skylake. It hardly has notably superior cache, memory subsystems or branch prediction compared to the Cortex-A57 in Note 5 and it's much less deeply OoO.Geekbench is also very far from fully residing in L1 cache, it's not Dhrystone.
lilmoe - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
JS benchmarks are BROWSER BENCHMARKS, NOT CPU benchmarks. Get that through to your head already.Show me a video where an iPhone 6S "significantly" beats a GS6 in REAL WORLD loading of webpages. Sheeshh....
ciderrules - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Oh look, a logical fallacy. Shift the burden of proof to others and ask them to provide the evidence to counter your claims instead of proving them yourself.ciderrules - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
A logical fallacy I see. Shift the burden of proof to others instead of providing the proof yourself.lilmoe - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Youtube is filled with these comparison videos, smarty pants. Take your pick.easp - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
An your point is what, that you buy phones to run CPU benchmarks?ciderrules - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Complete rubbish.The A9 absolutely TROUNCES the 7420 in single core performance and they are essentially equal in multi core.
"Let the single-threaded argument go, people".
Spoken like someone on the losing end of single core performance who's desperately trying to justify having multiple cores when most of the software they use can't even take advantage of them.
lilmoe - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
None of you are interested in an educated discussion, and I'm certainly not interested in a flame war."most of the software they use can't even take advantage of them"
See what what I mean? Do your research before whining.
ciderrules - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Sorry, but I write code. It is very difficult (outside of benchmarks or certain special use cases) to divide your code into threads and have each of those threads doing an equal amount of work. A thread running on a separate core that's sitting idle much of the time (say a thread monitoring the touchscreen for input) isn't properly utilizing that core at all.lilmoe - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
"Sorry, but I write code"Any one can. Doesn't make you an expert in the subject at hand.
But I'm curious, do you write code for modern mobile apps?
ciderrules - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Sorry, no.The A9 absolutely TROUNCES the 7420 in single core and they are almost identical in multi core.
Considering the majority of software can't even utilize multiple cores effectively it's the single core tests that are the most important.
"Let the single-threaded argument go,. people" Spoken like someone trying to justify their mega-core device that doesn't even perform as good as a 2 core iPhone.
Toss3 - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Whatever happened to having a civil discussion on Anandtech? Of course a larger core is going to outperform smaller ones. I also don't know much about the software of iOS, but I assume it is a bit more efficient as well, which skews the performance numbers in the iPhone's favor. The A9 is a great chip, but pretty sure the s820 and Exynos 8890 have caught up to its performance numbers (the a9 is clocked much lower though). Remember that Apple is almost a year ahead of the rest when it comes to SoCs and phones; I see people comparing the S7 edge to the yet to be released iPhone 7, but it is meant to compete with the iPhone 6S, as those are the phones of the same generation.BurntMyBacon - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
@Toss3: "Of course a larger core is going to outperform smaller ones. I also don't know much about the software of iOS, but I assume it is a bit more efficient as well, which skews the performance numbers in the iPhone's favor."Apple controls the hardware and software in the browser benchmarks. It is entirely plausible that they would gear their browser to take advantage of their heavy single threaded performance. In the end, this would help their end user experience as well, so I think we can take this as an assumed. Of course, that doesn't take away from the expectation that (assuming equally competent designers and process node) a larger core should outperform a smaller one in single threaded applications given its greater resources.
Others have said this, but it bears repeating. Huge differences in benchmarks can be seen on different platforms, browsers, or even configurations of the same browser. These differences exist for various reasons. To be sure, some are trying to game benchmarks. However, some are legitimately targeting a different aspect of the end user experience than the benchmark in question. Of course, some are just lazy or outdated. Conclusion, javascript benchmarks (or any benchmark that is extremely software/platform dependent) are a bad way to make conclusions about hardware as too many variables remain uncontrolled for proper testing. Now if you had the same OS, browser (including version), and configuration, there may be some merit as those variables are controlled. That simply isn't going to happen while Apple and Android make use of mutually exclusive hardware and operating systems.
lilo777 - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
I do not quite understand why some people overemphasize the importance of single threaded performance when most of the tasks that really need the performance (gaming, image processing, compression, encryption etc.) are all perfectly multi-theadable. The trade off between having the highest performance when it does not matter (A9) vs having it when it actually matters (7420) seems to be pretty simple. Did you notice that Apple stopped using single/dual core CPUs on their laptops long ago. Why is that?mabellon - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
Gaming has actually been notoriously bound by single threaded performance. That's part of why DX12/Metal/Vulkan is such a big thing. Reducing CPU costs and increasing parallelism to eliminate the current CPU bottleneck on the main render core. This is also going to be critical for VR where today single threaded performance is critical for render latency.Image processing is a good example of something that is too easily parallelized. It's best to use a GPU as a result for long running image manipulations. Compression and Encryption while potentially good choices, are best implemented by hardware offloads rather than a CPU.
No I did not notice Apple stopped using dual cores... because they didn't. The vast majority of what they sell is dual. The Macbook 12", MBA 11", MBA 13", Macbook Pro 13", entry level iMac, and every Mac Mini is a dual core. The only quad core laptop is the Macbook Pro 15".
Not only that but Apple makes the A9X in the iPad Pro. They could have easily made it a lower clocked quad core but instead made 2 high speed cores. They spent die space on cache and GPU rather than CPU cores. Because single threaded CPU performance really is that important.
Meteor2 - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Of course there is the question, how much performance is enough? I'm not seeing a great need for more performance outside of gaming.Dobson123 - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
The Galaxy S6 also got warm pretty quickly.lilmoe - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Oh, I also wouldn't judge units on display if I were you.1) they've been kneaded like crazy from various people. who knows who did what.
2) That persistent, powerhog showroom/presentation software mode is on, which significantly slows down the device.
nerd1 - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Comparing a production phone to the developer platform is a big joke..Toss3 - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
They did say this in the article: "We haven't had the opportunity to benchmark the Snapdragon 820 Galaxy S7 yet, therefore I included the score numbers of the MDP/S platform to represent a best-case scenario for the Snapdragon 820 until we can get apples-to-apples scores based on Samsung's browser". We also have some benchmarks of the G5 already, and the s820 seems to be a top-performer!babadivad - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
So is everyone jumping back on the Snapdragon bandwagon now?nerd1 - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
810 was not bad on developer platform. We have to wait and see.babadivad - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
That's true, but early benchmarks have the G5 out performing the S7 with the Exynos. That's what I was referring to.syxbit - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Agreed. Qualcomm need to regain trust after the SD810 fiascoKoolAidMan1 - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Oh wow, this doesn't compete at all with Apple's SoC from last year. Consider how far behind this will be when the A10 drops later this year.CBone - Sunday, February 21, 2016 - link
Apple's SoCs are benchmark beasts but perform roughly the same in non-bench apps and browsing. The new chip is always touted as being XX% faster over last year's model but the only tangible differences are in benchmark apps.Android has so much crap going on at any given time, the extra power is noticable in almost everything.
Wulfgardr - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Faker. And troll.Meteor2 - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Uh?jjj - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
So the difference will be made by power and thermal.That MP12 got to throttle hard. Hope SD820 GPU perf drops by some 40% and this the 8990 not much worse.
It would be great if you could downclock the CPU in gaming and see if you can get better framerates. Got the feeling thermal management could be better on the CPU side in gaming - ofc that would vary by game.
extide - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Why do you think the MP12 will throttle hard? If anything it will throttle less than the MP8 in the 7420, better process, lower clocks, etc will make it produce less power. Running at lower clockspeed is more efficient because you get to lower voltage. They specifically widened it out so they could run it more efficiently so that it would NOT throttle.jjj - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
The Exynos 7420 is using an older gen GPU and a direct comparison is not ideal. MPX means X cores, just saying to make sure you know that.The Exynos 7420 was dropping in perf some 50%. and was T760MP8 on 14LPE. Here you got T880MP12 on 14LPP and the process is just a bit better.
We do know that Huawei has T880MP4 at 900MHz on 16ff+ so 3 times smaller GPU at 38% higher clocks and it throttles very little. We could do some math based on that but that would mean that we are assuming the same TDP for all else and all else is using quite a lot of power and with diff cores and diff clocks we just can't assume that all else will be equal.The max TDP of the device will likely differ too, the S7 does have a heatpipe.
All in all it is pretty hard to be sure how much it will throttle, the CPU and memory controller will matter a lot but it is very likely that there will be some hard throttling , i hope not more than 40% but maybe with some luck it's 30%. Mali T880 does have some neat memory bandwidth saving feature and ,in theory, they could do a better job than in the past at managing the CPU during gaming.
The past and this remark here that the LG G5 and the S7 do get rather hot are not good signs.
tuxRoller - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Why do you hope that the adreno 530 will have 40% lower perf?jjj - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Hope Adreno 530 throttles some 40% and not more, guess my phrasing wasn't ideal.After last year i'm happy if it's only 40%..
Additionally, i see the resulting perf as ok for 1440p in actual gaming, not 60FPS but at least above 30FPS and significantly better than what the Exynos 7420 delivered last year.. If the throttling would be more than 40% it wouldn't be much fun.
I am just being cautious and keeping my expectations low.
tuxRoller - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
That's quite reasonable.We'll have to see what arch changes they made (I don't think they were significant based on a quick look at the freedreno drm) and if the new node is enough to offset the greater performance.
alex3run - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
These benchmarks mean nothing. When I bought Note 4 it gave twice the ONscreen score of my previous phone GS4. But when it came to games... I was just surprised to see GS4 suprassing a lot faster Note on paper.So let's see games.
N Zaljov - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Thanks for the short but informative Exynos 8 warp up, Andrei!Another question (although nobody except me will seriously care about it): Do you know the exact kernel-version used for the Exynos 8890 BSP?
All i do know, is that Qualcomm relies on 3.18.20 for their msm8996 BSP.
N Zaljov - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
*wrap up. This is my first comment and I'm already mistyping stuff. Mea culpa.Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
It was running 3.18.14.N Zaljov - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Thanks for the reply.I'm looking forward to your in-depth review of the Exynos 8890. Hopefully, my "test-dummy" is gonna arrive soon.
SydneyBlue120d - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Is unlimited HEVC encoding with both IOS and HDR at 2160p60 supported? Thanks a lot.alamilla - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
I think I've stumbled into the WCCFTech comment sectionjann5s - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
I don't understand why samsung would build an SD820 and an Exynos8890 version, can somebody explain?However, it will provide a nice comparison platform
Kvaern2 - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
If I'm not mistaken then it's because they they lack the IP rights to build their own modem for the US market and they are pretty much forced to use Qualcomm's CPU if they want a Qualcomm modem due to Qualcomms pricing scheme.extide - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Nope, the Galaxy S6 lines and the Note 5 all used a complete Samsung Chipset, the 7420 AP, plus the Shannon 333 modem.I mean, the Qualcomm modem is better, but yeah, I agree with the OP, I don;t see why they really do this, unless they are just trying to remain friendly with Qualcomm...?
N Zaljov - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
If I remember correctly, the CDMA models of the S6 and Note 5 are using an MDM9x35 modem.extide - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Boy, sure is a bit disappointing that we will not see the 8890 in the US. Not that I have anything against the 820, but there are plenty of other phones that will be available with it, but I doubt we will see thee 8890 in anything :(.I really think Qualcomm should have gone with more cores. Either go with 6 Kry cores, or put some A53 or even A35's in there. As it stands, it really falls behind in MP performance, which actually does matter to some degree.
Avidanyum - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Problem no roms for exyons no cyanogenmod for you!cynic783 - Monday, February 22, 2016 - link
Checkmate Crapple! Android so much faster its not even funny now.CrazyElf - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
The bottom line seems to be that the Apple chips are vastly superior (we're talking a generation, maybe more) ahead in single threaded CPU performance.This is something that Android SOC designers need to work on - big time. We're talking a gap on the order of 2580-30% here, and when the A10 comes out, it will probably be something on the order of 50-75%.
There is also the fact that Apple's chips probably run cooler too - I'd love to see a performance per watt in single threaded comparison. It won't be pretty for Android I bet. (Oh and just so you know, I'm far from an Apple fan).
We need more information here, but between the Exynos 8890 and the Snapdragon 820, I'd rather have the 820.
- It is looking (from the limited info we have) like the 820 has a stronger GPU
- Exynos means zero chance of custom ROMs based on AOSP
Although there is some OS scheduling, I don't think that all 4 cores can be used effectively right now.
Again too early to tell and we need to see if either chip throttles in real life.
jjj - Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - link
Since when is going with fewer cores more advanced?Apple has 2 big cores and less efficient in both perf and power. Crippled multitasking and battery life because of it. Nobody tests battery life anywhere close to proper . Users have at least a few apps that are always lurking in the background and draining resources and that's a lot more damaging on 2 big cores than on bigLITTLE.
Apple keeps it dumb and simple and costly. That's not ahead, it's 5 years behind.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
What's your basis for saying that the a9 is "less efficient in both perf and power"? It seems to be really good at racing to idle despite having a lower clock than many (all?) of the Android flagships.Fx1 - Monday, February 29, 2016 - link
What your all forgetting is that i wouldnt be seen dead with an iPhone. the 6S battery is shocking and the restricted experience doesnt come close to Android. 6S plus is like a paving slab and is ugly as hell and the 6s has a crappy low res screen. Seriously dont care about mobile CPU for 2 years now as they are all rapid!rednafi - Friday, March 25, 2016 - link
optimization is better than raw power.when will sammy learn...