In most of the graphs where the iPhone is present, they trounce anything else. It is quite disappointing, being an Android enthusiast, to see that the 835 does not catch up with a 6 month old phone...
This is comparing apples to oranges. Unless the two CPUs run the same code, performance is irrelevant.
The web is majorly a shitpile of bloat, ridden with inefficiency. Apple simply invested more time into optimizing their web / JS implementation. This is not really indicative of CPU performance, only of web implementation optimizations.
And while it is true that apple's single threaded performance has been better, that is only a part of the story. You have the budget of n amount of transistors to put into x amount of total performance. If you have more threads, then obviously individual threads will be slower. Optimizing for low count threads is actually a pretty good idea given the typical mobile device usage patterns.
Why do most ARM chipmakers push for higher core count is a mystery to me. That is a STUPID strategy. It makes it that much harder to squeeze the most of your hardware.
I've been running proprietary software on phones and tables since 2012, software designed to scale adequately, and as a result, I see better overall performance from flagship android devices despite apple's better ST performance, but only because of the kind of workloads I am running. So while the chips aren't anywhere nearly as slow as AT's lame benchmarking suite would suggest, it is not exactly straightforward to get the max of their performance.
Lastly, the is this thing called "fast enough". Even if apple chips are traditionally faster in typical mobile applications than those found in android devices, this is not really an issue if the slower devices are still fast enough. I haven't really seen bottlenecks in the few 3rd party android apps I am using, so even with software that has not been designed to make use of many cores, things still run fast enough to not present an issue in regards with user experience.
All in all, in general I'd say ARM is not really trying to make things good, at least not as far as the user is concerned. The only reason apple invest into tangibly improving on the stock ARM designs is for the hype factor, rather than actually putting that performance into productivity. Mobile platforms are doubly limited just to make sure they don't revolutionize computing, both in terms of hardware, and available software. Pretty much next to useless toys, intended to use you far more than you use them, unless you have the resources to put into developing proprietary software tailored to your productivity needs.
Apple has yet another advantage. Since it controls its ecosystem end to end it can optimize the software for their specific hardware. In the Android ecosystem you have configurations ranging from 1 to 10 cores (or more?), so many different generations, so many different custom and semi-custom cores. A little trickier to optimize. So Android OEMs go for the numbers. Core numbers that is. Now with 25% more cores.
And lets not forget another aspect. Historically Apple focused on optimizing the SoC layout for performance which led to much bigger cores which doesn't seem to be the method of choice in the Android ecosystem. They worked on improving the density, especially with the A8 and the A10.
Yep...iPhone's A10 Fusion chip is very capable indeed. And in September they're probably going to announce a better one (maybe called "A11"). Looks like Apple is ahead of everyone else, especially when it comes to web-related speeds.
Guess what? I have never seen any comparison between iPhone 7 and flagship Android phone with SD821 where iPhone 7 is faster in app and browsing site. These benchmarks mean nothing if you are using different platforms particularly OS.
This "test" is broken. Instead of measuring each activity individually, the test mashes them all together and measures total time. This makes no sense whatsoever - users are interested in doing one thing at a time, so individual tests somehow reflect perceived speed of the device.
Measuring all together is not how we use these kind of devices. Especially that a lot of those activities reflect the mass storage sequential read. So all PhoneBuff needed to have done to show his beloved device was the fastest, was to put enough application load activities and leverage faster IO.
So I do think this "test" is so much worse than the above, posted by @joms_us.
Kind of an unfair test. On Android, they completely disabled animations, so apps appear as soon as they are loaded, but on iOS there is no option for that. They claim they disabled animations on iOS, but they actually just enabled the reduce motion feature, which doesn't disable animations, but just changes them from a zoom to a fade animation.
No. You seem to miss the point, as apperent from your post, comparing a SoC (835) to a complete product (6 month old phone). This is an important distinction, as pointed out by the editors: commanding victories in JS department come largely (if not solely) from the JS engine used by the browser.
Let's nitpick the iPhone7s standings:
CPU tests: 8 x N/A, 3 x 1st (all JavaScript) GPU tests: joint 1st, 2nd, N/A, N/A, 6, 2, 12, 1, N/A N/A, joint 1st So iPhone is present on 10 graphs, being non-joint 1st ("trouncing everything else") on 4 of them. Hardly "most of graphs".
iPhone 7 scores 3306 in geekbench 4 single core, while the fastest android Samsung Galaxy S7 scores 1789 (https://browser.primatelabs.com/ios-benchmarks). So, yankeeDDL is correct, Apple's A10 trounces everything else (in single thread, which is the most important in a smartphone).
No worse than any of the other tests such as PCMark. The importance is that all of these devices will perform about the same in real world use as they do in these tests.
Yep, PCMark is the best out there. It is doing real tasks, you can see what it is doing not just some random progress bar or percent like Geekbench LoL.
Geekbench scores shouldn't be compared across platforms since language used as well as the compiler can make a lot of difference.
My old lenovo y510p scored 3600 single core on geekbench single core in Windows. When I booted in Ubuntu, the score jumped to 4400. Multi core scores were 11000 and 12500 respectively.
As evident, it's pretty pointless to compare it. Not to mention that almost all the tests can be done in L2 cache if it's sufficiently big. That's a really unrealistic test.
The iPhone 7 also scores a lot better in BaseMark OS II as well. At that stage we are looking at 3 benchmarks where iPhone trounces the best Android - although you can pick minor problems with each benchmark if you want - the overall picture is that the A10 performs better.
Yes, and that's important. Too many benchmarks, in order to have some kind of equivelance, don't compile specifically to a particular chip. They don't support specific functions, so it may not be a comparable test. They must support, and properly, all of the features of a chip family.
@lefty2: "So, yankeeDDL is correct, Apple's A10 trounces everything else (in single thread, which is the most important in a smartphone)."
1) yankeeDDL did not make the single thread qualification that you made. Nor was any benchmark outside of this review mentioned. Therefore, yankeeDDL was not correct, regardless of the accuracy of your take on the situation.
2) You are using a single data point to disregard the entire benchmark suite here. Disregarding the perfectly legitimate reasons why the reviewers have chosen to leave geekbench out of the review suite, this still only gives the A10 one more win. Even then, you are purposefully leaving out the multi core data point, which puts the A10 only slightly ahead of Exynos 8890 in the Galaxy S7. I suspect, but can't confirm, that the A10 would lose to both the Kirin 960 and the Kryo 280. Yes, single threaded performance is important, but the Geekbench workload clearly isn't representative of all workloads.
Don't worry, the A10 isn't suddenly slow. It still ranks among the fastest SoCs on the market and is even still the top dog for certain senarios. Furthermore, platform optimizations and better use of APIs (see the javascript and basemark benchmarks) will likely hide any minor deficiencies until the A11(?) is released.
I disregard multi threaded because most smartphone apps don't use multiple threads. Even for desktop PCs, single threaded performance is more important that multi threaded
Didn't anandtech do an analysis of Android a while ago and find pretty much the exact opposite? And that was like a year ago so it can only have gotten better since then.
A nice thing Android does, if you'd like to try a simple java application, is that it automatically optimizes applications to use multiple threads even if you as a developer don't design it to do so. I noticed this the other day as I was building a quick prototype for a network application, whereby I just wanted to test it out, it never hit above 20% on each core (Android has a nice feature under Developer > Show CPU usage) even though the app should have frozen while waiting for the network thread to complete. Lovely libraries provided definitely have an impact on it and CPU developers take advantage of that fact when they create a CPU for an Android system, same thing that Apple does when it focuses on single-thread performance.
They showed the Android browser using many threads. What was missing from my POV was the performance gain from these additional threads. One can assume Google woudln't do it like that if it wasn't worth, but I'd prefer measurements.
Browser use many threads to stop i/o requests from blocking the main thread, but those i/o are not doing any work, just waiting for the request to return from the server.
No, what they found was that battery life wasn't effected. Sometimes using all cores gave a small boost to performance, and sometime it degraded performance. It's mostly marketing hype. The more the better.
Multicore performance isn't real world on phones, and likely on tablets as well. Very few apps, almost none of them in fact, support more than two cores. Even when multitasking, something that isn't done on phones the way it might be on desktops, doesn't benefit terribly with more cores. And the legitimacy of using all big/little cores at once is even worse.
I do think multicore performance is more important than you seem to believe, but as I said above, single core performance is also important. It is generally more important than multicore performance, but not so much that I can just dismiss multicore performance. The A10 still does well in most multithreaded use cases despite the lower number of cores.
I've never been a fan of big.LITTLE anyways (particularly with the large clusters). It seems like the wrong way to handle the efficiency issue to me. Without going into a long discussion, I'll point out that the A9 (and predecessors) and Intel's lineup do just fine without it. If Android could assign tasks to individual cores based on need rather than swapping entire clusters in and out, then there may be some benefit to keeping background processes on low power cores to improve battery life and responsiveness of foreground applications, but you still wouldn't need a 4+4 configuration. In any case, that's a discussion for another time.
You keep saying that it's not "real world" when earlier there were links provided that should be showing you that in the real world, today, multithread already matters, and having more real/virtual cores helps. This is all for the simplest and most used task for cell phones, web browsing, multi threading is quite useful. I'm fairly confident that if an Android manufacturer ran on hardware identical to the iPhone and outscored it across the board, you'll buy the iPhone anyways. Good for you but you're not helping in this discussion, just admit your apple fanboyism and bow out. Why do you even care about the SD 835?
Let me be more specific then. Web browsing is a key part of mobile experience. In the Kraken, WebXPRT and JetStream the performance difference is stunning: Kraken: 2.4X faster; WebXPRT: 1.35X faster, JetStream: 2.4X faster. Yes, the difference is not only due to HW, but also to code optimization. Still: damn!
In the GPU department: in GFXBench, the performance is on-par (when reported). There's a noticeable advantage of the S835 in 3DMark (1.4X Overall), but in Basemark we loose again by nearly 2X.
Yes, the comparison is (a bit) apples to oranges, but one has to admit that for a brand new SoC it would make sense to expect an hands-down victory over a noticeably older phone.
@yankeeDDL: "Still: damn!" Agreed, Apple has a massive advantage in javascript benchmarks. It is impossible to say how much (if any) of that is due to the SoC vs the software stack, but the advantage is undeniable.
It is not unexpected that the A10 would win in Basemark. The A10 is making use of a low level API (Metal) where the SD835 is using a high level API (OpenGL ES). Again, Apple's better software cohesion and better use of APIs benefits them here. Still, the difference is quite formidable and the SD835 actually looses to the Kirin 960 as well. It would seem that the Adreno 540 is not well suited to this workflow. Therefore, it is unlikely that use of Vulkan will suddenly propel them ahead, but the gap would be a lot smaller. By the time use of Vulkan becomes common place, A11(?) will be out, so it's really a moot point.
The GFXBench Car Chase ES 3.1 / Metal chart title suggests it should have an Apple data point (only user of "Metal"). It'll likely show the same thing as the basemark test given the disparate APIs, but I'm still curious (though not critical without further considerations) as to why it wasn't included.
The fact that you can't get an A10 without iOS and you can't get iOS on another companies SoC makes considerations about whether it is better than the android SoCs or not a tertiary concern and academic when compared to the overall platform experience. There are plenty of reasons not to like an iProduct. Performance isn't generally one of them.
If you take into account Qualcomm's optimized browser, the differences relative to the iPhone 7 change to: (% better than the sd835) Kraken: 140 -> 106 webxprt: 35 -> -26 jetstream: 140 -> 92
I'm sure they could do more, but I'd be amazed if the remaining differences in kraken & jetsteam were mostly due to software.
Yes, A10 is a quad-core big.LITTLE SoC, w/a 12-core GPU, I believe... as well, Apple on the 7+ added another GB of RAM = 3GB on an iOS phone, iPad 12.9" has 4GB -- but the iOS integration with the A10... as well, the last several generations of 'home brewed' ARM chips - and Apple's investments in silicon engineering from nVidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TI and others has paid dividends.
That said, off Apple/AX chipsets for a second.... excellent 'first look' and factory/testing insight. That is very cool stuff!
I think, as geeks, and 'passionate' groups of faithful mobile phone OS folks amongst our population, folks who take this stuff more seriously than the Sunday sermon... we should all take a breath and remember that it's a 'chip preview' Not an Android phone!
The issues with using the same chip on every device running Android --and every OEM 'skinning' their handset is a huge contributor to the varying performances; real world or objective bench tests. Like Windows as an OS on the desk and lap over the years, we've ALL had our 'Vista' moments. I'm an OS X/macOS user specifically because of 'vista and a curiosity about OS X in 2006 --- but again, I digress...
Qualcomm has built a chip able to be put in to every flagship other than iOS this year and 'compete' just fine. In the performance metrics all above are bickering about. But as an iPhone 7+ owner/lover (it's an excellent phone) -- my appreciation for the 835 goes well beyond its parity or near ...or exceeding metrics of CPU and GPU, they've built a gigabit LTE modem (who cares if you won't 'get that' - it's still gonna haul ass!) - incredible image processing and 'encryption/protection' with its iris scanning and biometric uses ...as well as the smaller node, the AIO model with all,parts of the 'brain' build in house --- IMHO, it's a 50-50 tie between chip engineering but I'm bias as an ambidextrous user since '07/'08 (iOS/Android) - I have always had one of each, the family is iOS and since switching everyone over, my workload has decreased 95%. It's vertical and horizontal integration and aggregation with macOS is, still to me, science fiction and for the family business... a God Send.
That said --- my S6 has an Exynos (sp?) processor, Note 4 was Qualcomm and, as I skip Android gens, my next will be a Qualcomm. I know as an iPhone 7+ owner I was delighted to learn that the model I bought has a Qualcomm modem, not the Intel;)
Special trip for you guys. Great write up and truly amazing to me ...I'm 45, born with the 8086 processor and the progress mankind has made in such a tiny package, which is high speed connected with exponentially more power than just a decade ago... in our pocket. We all need to remember between our friendly iOS/Android 'disputes' -- the special world we enjoy today specifically BECAUSE Apple and Google/Qualcomm/SnapDragons and their host of OEMs building what just a decade ago meant 110v, plugged in No mobility, significantly slower - even wired connectivity. None of the 'Millions' of free, $1, $5 & ten buck 'programs/software' then, apps, now - available on demand! Over 30 million song libraries, endless knowledge and tools, true magic is what I think the SD835 A10 Fusion and their predecessors are/were. I'm old now, but not compared with the mountains I live in -- lucky enough to have spent the second ½ of my life quite literally watching these chips come to fruition ...I think it's the A10 when announced... it had/has over 3 billion transistors... and the SoC's the size of our fingernail!
Screw arguing. It's a competitive world and WE are the beneficiaries!
the 835 has a 10% stronger gpu than a10, its just nuts that apple, not being a cpu designer at heart, can design a better cpu/soc that is years ahead of of what arm and qualcomm can produce
There is a price/performance trade off with processors. Apple has chosen to make a much bigger processor which is why it is faster. Think Atom vs Core. One is slow but cheap and one is expensive and fast. Apple are not "years ahead". They have chosen to spend more on the processor.
"They have chosen to spend more on the processor" They also had 64bit arm cores 2 years before Qualcomm released theirs, And that's is why they are year's ahead in performance and power efficiency
64bit has not gave them any more speed (even apple said 64bit did not affect speed), more due to cpu and IOS optimisation (just lets them use 4gb later on )
The A10 is still an ARM processor. They do their own tweaking of the hardware to make it good. They also have full control of the both the hardware and software stack so they can optimize them to work together efficiently.
Apple has an architectural license with ARM. They design their chips from the ground up. It's believed that they may have one with Imagination for the GPU as well.
The advantage they have is that the OS developers work hand in hand with the hardware designers to optimize both the hardware and OS for each other. No one else can do that.
As others have said, apple's design has been made with very particular goals in mind. Going wider and slower is, normally, more power efficient than narrower and faster, assuming you can actually feed the beast. You pay the cost in silicon and yield, however.
Would be interesting to see Chrome results on all platforms. Using Chrome for Android and Safari for iOS is misleading. As the article said, Qualcomm's internal browser gets 280 in WebXPRT 2015, which trounces the iPhone 7's 208. (Though it's still slower in the other web benchmarks.)
Since this is a preview of a chip, and not an actual phone review, I think it would be helpful if the model of the chip in each phone be put next to them in the charts instead of just the S7. It's quite inconvenient to have to go look it up while in the middle of reading the article.
With that said, I've noticed that mobile chips tend to vary a more widely from generation to generation than desktop parts seem too (they loose ground in certain areas, with big drops in the 20%+ range).
Is this a result of a compromise for power reduction, or are they just not as good at this yet as Intel?
Seeing my Le Pro 3 there with the big boys on top, I think I will use it for now until the arrival of Le Pro 4 or 5 with SD836 ( overclocked version of SD835) =D
Regarding the iris recognition and the comment about getting rid of the fingerprint sensor button from the front...why not just put it on the back. I use an Honor 7 and the fingerprint sensor is on the back and works really, really well there.
Really good article. I wish you'd do GB4/MHz testing for Apple's ARM cores and for x86 chips though! And dump Kraken for Octane. The latter is much broader, isn't it?
Couldn't you use Chrome on iOS to level the playing field a bit for JavaScript benchmarks?
False, Qualcomm has been able to see of competitors with their integrated modems, heterogeneous computing matters more in the mobile arena not geeky benchmarks.
Except that GB does not utilize all cores efficiently. Imagine the weakest core scored 2K and there are 7 more cores. The MC score of SD835 should be at least 10K minimum but it is not because GB is worthless. Think Cinebench, it scales linearly with the number of cores and it maximizes them all.
I think saying "does not utilize all cores efficiently" is quite far off the mark. As far as I can tell there's two aspects why the mt score doesn't scale quite as much as you seem to expect: 1) GB score is composited, being composed of int, float, memory. The former two would scale pretty much as good as it gets, but the latter (which has weight 20% of the total score) obviously does not. 2) It's not geekbench's fault that these smartphone socs can't reach max frequency on all cores simultaneously
What a load of nonsense. GB uses all cores efficiently and it scales just perfectly. You just have a severe misunderstanding of both of the SoC and how the GB score is composed. Calling it worthless just because you don't understand it just makes you look stupid.
And just for the sake of education:
Just because there's 8 cores and the strongest SC score is 2K doesn't mean you can just take some multiplier number to get to the MC score. First of all 20% of both the SC and MC scores are composed of the memory performance which simply doesn't scale much if at all between SC and MC scenarios.
If you look at the integer and floating point sub-scores you see that they're pretty much as you expect. When they're not, it's because the SoC's top frequency is only valid for single-core loads and drops to a lower frequency when using more of them, something that the S835 seems to do.
Nonsense, here is a task that 8 people can do if they all work together but only one is doing it 100%, the 2nd person 50-75% and the rest just 5-10% so they ended up finishing only half of it. That's how GB distributes load because of its pathetic threading and tasks distribution. Cinebench does it perfectly by distributing the rendering tasks in each core separately.
You cannot say one SoC is weaker than another because GB is not maximizing its potential. Each core after then 2nd is just contributing about 500 points because they were useless throughout the testing.
Nah, the 2k is from the high performance core, geekbench can't just schedule a task to a particular core, that's the job of the scheduler in the the os. The highest performance core is always used to run large single threaded load.
> Nonsense, here is a task that 8 people can do if they all work together but only one is doing it 100%, the 2nd person 50-75% and the rest just 5-10% so they ended up finishing only half of it. That's how GB distributes load because of its pathetic threading and tasks distribution.
Can you guys do a "What Ifs" short post on the expected changes if Apple went with an 8 core A11 or if Exynos/Snapdragon next iterations would score 3500 on Geekbench. What changes would we see where?
Since you are good at it, why don't you log the freq and usage of GB in 5 runs and show us which Cores are being used heavily. Stop logging each run at around 25% and another set at 100%. And if you don't mind, what is the name of that usage app you've shown in the image? TIA
They're all at maximum frequency and 100% always when the workloads are kicking in. Stop wasting people's time with your nonsense claims. I proved my claims, your turn to prove yours. You can use Trepn.
Remember the news about benchmark cheating of Samsung and now Oneplus? What they did are perfectly valid because a worthless app like Geekbench does not measure the true IPC of the SoC if it can't maximize it. You go to Windows world, people will disable CnQ or Speedstep and Powernow just to make sure processor is running at 100% of frequency to measure true IPC.
P.S Thanks for the name of the app, I appreciate it!
I remember in Windows Pc, is hard to get all cores stay flat at 100% unless I got very good multithread multiprocessor designed program like Ansys or Abaqus. Means its very tough to get/program a software that can utilize all cores stay at 100%.
lol, I was literally being sarcastic in my comment. Looks like it stirred a lot of angry replies.
- Geekbench does scale well across all cores. That's not the problem. Geekbench sucks as a benchmark for "absolute" performance of the CPU portion of an SoC (or platform like QC likes to call it) that matters for modern workloads. In addition to that, the way it calculates the totals and how the devs decide what sub-score counts more than what is absolute BS. Most of the workloads it tests are rarely dealt with the CPU and more commonly offloaded to co-processors. Yes, even on iOS devices. I find the compute portion of geekbench rather interesting, but it's rarely discussed by anyone.
- CPUs are getting less and less relevant in modern content consumption workloads. Offloading to co-processors, if at all possible, is the way to go. For instance, Intel's latest 7700K CPU (cpu only) pales in comparison to the least efficient 4K encoding/decoding block implementation on any modern platform, including ARM based SoCs. The same goes for image processing/manipulation, audio, speech recognition, security, etc, etc.... You know, the sub-tests that Geekbench performs.
- Interconnect, bandwidth, cache throughput and latency, and Scheduling play a huge part in the multi-core score of a CPU/SoC. Generally, the more cores you have, the harder and more power consuming it is to scale multiple threads across those cores, _especially_ on processors constrained with a 2-4 watt power envelope. Those caches are very power hungry and often limit scaling by 10-20% of ST even on non-power limited CPUs. That percentage is much, MUCH higher on ultra mobile ARM parts.
- In addition to those scaling issues, the Snapdragon 835, similar to Samsung's Exynos and HiSilcon's Kirin SoCs are big.LITTLE multi-cluster configurations. Typically, only 1 of these clusters is high performance, and only when you're running a single or couple of threads would the high performance cores reach their highest clocks. That's by design of ultra-low power, passively cooled parts. The Exynos 8890 gets up to 2.6Ghz in ST and 2.2Ghz in MT. Again, in addition to clock variance, you'll never get 8x ST since only 4 of those 8 cores are high performance. The smaller cores are nowhere near as powerful. I say they would count as Intel's virtual threads in their hyper threading (SMT), and should help to achieve better scaling by just a tiny bit.
So, yea. I was being sarcastic. I agree with Qualcomm. These modern ARM SoCs are very sophisticated and tricky to benchmark. Nothing about them is simple. What ultimately matters is how much time it takes them to complete a modern workload, and how much power they consume at that. The more of these workloads are offloaded to co-processors, the better.
For the CPU portion, what matters in a smartphone/tablet, first and foremost, is multi-core performance, and how much of that performance is sustained over time with the least amount of power consumption. ST performance is overrated doesn't matter, AT ALL, after a certain performance threshold IN MOBILE DEVICES. Split second javascript gains as a result of browser optimization or real ST lead of a particular SoC are irrelevant. Javascript doesn't exist in a vacume, it's part of a web page/app, and how long it takes a browser to fully load a page and render its content is what ultimately matters. Period.
"I find the compute portion of geekbench rather interesting, but it's rarely discussed by anyone."
Why is that the case?
Btw, this is a much better comment. What you are saying is why relevant benchmarks don't exist for mobile devices (sub-laptops). The issue, i believe, is that sites, largely, test these devices like small computers (bear with me). As such, they focus on cpu related tasks. Some sites include video recording/playback power usage, but none, tmk, include task traces that are taken from someone actually using a device.
If all you care about is a running a headless server that can't communicate with the outside world, then, yeah! If you care about battery life and good performance, low power processors (microcontrollers or tiny a series cores used for handling interrupts or more general duties when in a low power state), dsps and gpus matter. Do we need a hashtag?
Again I am impressed by the Snapdragon 625 showing here in the cpu tests, particulary in the PC mark tests, not so much in the Javascript. Still performing much better than expected. The G5 plus is starting to look quite appealing assuming its tweaked the same ways the Moto z play is
"The [3DMark] Physics test runs on the CPU and is heavily influenced by how well an SoC’s memory controllers handle random access patterns. "
No it isn't, at least not to an extent that matters in any modern CPU. Why do you keep posting this rubbish in review after review?
The source code is available for examination. It basically tests (frequency)*(number of cores) and is useless for learning anything beyond that. That's why it's always the only test in which Apple looks bad --- because Apple's running two cores as opposed to 4/6/8/10 on Android, and, at least in the past, those cores were under-clocked relative to the Android cores.
If people want to post the 3DMark Physics numbers, whatever, I don't care. But I do think doing so is a waste of reviewers' and readers' time --- there is simply no useful additional information provided by that benchmark. The fact that 3DMark continues to push it (as opposed to the way GeekBench every year or two tries to respond to complaints and concerns about its benchmarks) tell you something about the relative professionalism of the two companies.
"It basically tests (frequency)*(number of cores)"
Both of these are factors, but it's not the whole story according to the developer I spoke with at Futuremark. If you have additional information to prove your claim, please share it with me via email. My mind is always open :)
I looked into this in detail years ago when there was a big kerfuffle about the iPhone 5S score. I'm not interested in spending another day doing the exact same thing. I'll just point out that what I am saying matches the data. Sure, I'm not saying that THE ONLY THING is (frequency)*(number of cores), there's some small 5 to 10% variation around that; but that variation is unimportant --- the big picture is embedded in what I said.
Now, does this mean it's a good benchmark? Well, how much code that people care about is multi-threaded (on Android and otherwise)? I'm not interested in relitigating that (given what I consider to be the astonishing incompetence and ignorance we saw on Anandtech the last time this was discussed, with a VAST proportion of readers apparently unaware of such concepts as timesharing, or how to accurately calculate the thread level parallelism of an executing piece of code). I will say that the most recent academic papers I've read, dated 2016, referring to work in around 2014, show that it's higher than you might expect, not as high as you might hope. Across a very wide range of Android apps the thread level parallelism is slightly larger than 2, showing, basically (in my interpretation) - an Android controlled thread doing misc stuff that's pretty busy - a main app thread - various small completion routines, async routines, and interrupts So basically two cores get you almost all the value in real world core, a third core occasionally picks up a small amount of extra available work.
Now read what I am saying before getting upset. I'm NOT saying that ARM is stupid to ship 4 (performance) cores. ARM cores are tiny, they can be of (very occasional) value to a few talented developers today, and the only way we'll EVER get the mass market to code more parallel is to have the hardware out there as the default. So I'm happy that ARM is flooding the world with hexacore, octacore, decacore chips. (And I think Apple is being penny-wise and pound-foolish by not making every SoC they ship a triple core ala A8X --- the extra area would be small, and it would likewise provide an incentive for developers to get off their asses.)
But that's a different argument from whether core-count provides "visible performance" today. I think the answer to that is clearly no. The first thing that matters to most users is snappiness (which depends, primarily, on flash performance, GPU [and the quality of the graphics code], performance governor (so does the CPU "start off" fast or "start off" slow and only get fast after .2 seconds of UI interaction? Then there are a few places where overall "endurance" performance matters (like much browser stuff, or viewing complicated PDFs --- both of which are very poorly threaded even as of 2017). Finally the cases where all cores all the time matters, and almost nothing else (the sort of thing 3DMark Physics is testing) are REALLY few and far between.
Or to put it another way. Most CPU microarchitecture improvement since 2000 has been about discovering and exploiting the stochastic structure of REAL-WORLD computation. There are re-uses and patterns in branching, in memory access, in instruction execution that are exploited ever more aggressively in branch prediction, in cache insertion and liveness tracking, in prefetching, in loop buffers, etc. A benchmark that prides itself on randomness and in providing no way for all those smarts to add value is saying SOMETHING about the worst case performance of a CPU, but it's not clear that that something is of any value to almost everyone.
How disappointing that yet another of the very few custom CPU designers is now gone. Looking at the general performance of the CPU now, I see no reason whatsoever to choose Qualcomm over some other, generic ARM hawker that's probably cheaper. They could at least stop pretending and just become a module seller, selling their GPU/modems/etc. separately as there doesn't seem to be any reason to choose a Qualcomm SOC as a whole.
Other than ditching their stock (if you haven't already) none of this looks good for Qualcomm. Or for ARM for that matter, the A73 doesn't offer any performance boost over the A72 and is still trounced by Apple. Maybe the rumors of Google building its own CPU will come true and we'll see it in the Pixel 2.
No reason? They're one of the few developer and open source friendly chip manufacturers around, even if that relationship ventures into frenemy territory once in a while. Qualcomm modems and imaging blocks are pretty good too.
Intel are developer friendly but their GPUs can be an abomination to work with. They've also effectively abandoned the mobile space. Mediatek, Huawei and Samsung either give a cold shoulder or a middle finger to devs.
They dropped their own custom cores because why even bother when vanilla ARM does a better job while being cheaper...Plus the economics for a non-Apple, non-Samsung bleeding edge SoC no longer makes much sense, and 99.99% of the population buying these phones doesn't and won't give a shit to the SoC or the benchmarks.
It wouldn't surprise me if Qualcomm had multiple core design teams competing with each other. We've seen ARM cores come before; maybe full-custom will come back next year.
I think they are just shifting their focus. The fact that they "rebranded" the snapdragon as a platform instead of just processor is one indicator. SOC is more than just cpu cores and they want people to know that. My guess is, they think that investing more money to develop a more unique platform is more important than spending valuable time and money on redoing the cpu core, ARM already invested a tons of money to develop it, no reason to reinvent the wheel when you can use the resources to provide a platform that will help them be more different then the others. I think it's wise for them. The resources would better off be spent to create a better DSP, modem, GPU etc, which will give them more return than a custom cpu core.
So the Exynos 8895 GPU should in theory be faster than the 540 by quite a bit? Since the Huawei 9 uses 8, whereas Exynos uses 20, but of course with a lower clockspeed. I can see it being at least 20-30% faster than the 540.
QUALCOMM PROCESSORS ARE GARBAGE. WHY WE HAVE TO PAY FOR AN INFERIOR HANDSET WHEN COMES TO SAMSUNG? I STILL HAVE AN S6 EDGE PLUS 64GB. NEVER HAD A PROBLEM WITH. BUT IF SAMSUNG THINKS IMY GONNA BUY A CRAPPIE S8 PLUS WITH QUALCOMM SNAPDRAGON INSIDE . BETTER THINK AGAIN. QUALCOMM IS CRAPPIE ALL THE WAY. I DON'T CARE IF QUALCOMM PEOPLE DIES OF HUNGER. I EXPECT A QUALITY AND HIGH PERFORMANCE HANDSET. SO S8 PLUS WITH SAMSUNG EXYNOS 8895 IS THE ONE I WANT. STOP DISCRIMINATING AGAINST U.S.CONSUMERS. OR FUCK SAMSUNG.
I just ran geekbench 4 on my Nexus 9 and it's getting higher values than the SD835 in most of the integer and floating point tests. These Denver cores are begging to be put in a smaller efficient FinFet node.
Recommendation for the comments section. Have the comments section automatically change the word loose to lose. It would correct quite a few grammar mistakes.
AMD really missed the boat when they sold their mobile assets to Qualcomm. I often wonder what AMD could have done if they had invested in developing mobile tech all these years
intel tried years after all these other companies got established. If AMD had gotten in earlier, instead of selling off to Qualcomm, AMD might be Qualcomm today
Not very possible. Qualcomm is where it's at today because of its early involvement with the CDMA technology and the subsequent development of great Modem chips. They could spend R&D money on their own GPU and cores because of the money coming from selling the whole package including the modem. AMD never had it and seeing how nVidia is struggling still with mobile chips, it's unlikely AMD would've fared much better.
regarding 3QA. i'm wondering if it requires special [hardware/firmware] support to use FDD and TD LTE together, or 3QA, by default, supports combining both types of LTE? (this is of course assuming all the other hardware requirement supports 3QA, and the carrier operates on both TD and FDD LTE. I'm wondering because one of the carrier in my country talked about combining both types to get the highest speed, but provides no info if any of the current phone will support it.
Why would not you just test Firefox everywhere? Better yet, Firefox with AdBlock installed, so the ads would be uniformly eliminated form the sites. This would allow to compare performance of iPhone hardware. Although the Safari test is also useful as it demonstrates more real life experience of iPhone users which is years ahead of even future Android phones unfortunately.
Memory copy, it shows the 821 as being faster yet you have it marked as negative and in red. Yet it's about twice as much bandwidth/second. So, the 821 is really superior in all the areas where it matters, camera performance, speech recognition and memory copy. I'd say the 835 is a pretty big failure. I'll be skipping that SOC entirely.
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yankeeDDL - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
In most of the graphs where the iPhone is present, they trounce anything else. It is quite disappointing, being an Android enthusiast, to see that the 835 does not catch up with a 6 month old phone...shing3232 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
but the bright side is that huge reduction in Power usage compare to 820ddriver - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
This is comparing apples to oranges. Unless the two CPUs run the same code, performance is irrelevant.The web is majorly a shitpile of bloat, ridden with inefficiency. Apple simply invested more time into optimizing their web / JS implementation. This is not really indicative of CPU performance, only of web implementation optimizations.
And while it is true that apple's single threaded performance has been better, that is only a part of the story. You have the budget of n amount of transistors to put into x amount of total performance. If you have more threads, then obviously individual threads will be slower. Optimizing for low count threads is actually a pretty good idea given the typical mobile device usage patterns.
Why do most ARM chipmakers push for higher core count is a mystery to me. That is a STUPID strategy. It makes it that much harder to squeeze the most of your hardware.
I've been running proprietary software on phones and tables since 2012, software designed to scale adequately, and as a result, I see better overall performance from flagship android devices despite apple's better ST performance, but only because of the kind of workloads I am running. So while the chips aren't anywhere nearly as slow as AT's lame benchmarking suite would suggest, it is not exactly straightforward to get the max of their performance.
Lastly, the is this thing called "fast enough". Even if apple chips are traditionally faster in typical mobile applications than those found in android devices, this is not really an issue if the slower devices are still fast enough. I haven't really seen bottlenecks in the few 3rd party android apps I am using, so even with software that has not been designed to make use of many cores, things still run fast enough to not present an issue in regards with user experience.
All in all, in general I'd say ARM is not really trying to make things good, at least not as far as the user is concerned. The only reason apple invest into tangibly improving on the stock ARM designs is for the hype factor, rather than actually putting that performance into productivity. Mobile platforms are doubly limited just to make sure they don't revolutionize computing, both in terms of hardware, and available software. Pretty much next to useless toys, intended to use you far more than you use them, unless you have the resources to put into developing proprietary software tailored to your productivity needs.
close - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Apple has yet another advantage. Since it controls its ecosystem end to end it can optimize the software for their specific hardware. In the Android ecosystem you have configurations ranging from 1 to 10 cores (or more?), so many different generations, so many different custom and semi-custom cores. A little trickier to optimize. So Android OEMs go for the numbers. Core numbers that is. Now with 25% more cores.And lets not forget another aspect. Historically Apple focused on optimizing the SoC layout for performance which led to much bigger cores which doesn't seem to be the method of choice in the Android ecosystem. They worked on improving the density, especially with the A8 and the A10.
ericgl21 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Yep...iPhone's A10 Fusion chip is very capable indeed. And in September they're probably going to announce a better one (maybe called "A11"). Looks like Apple is ahead of everyone else, especially when it comes to web-related speeds.Samip - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Did you not read the disclaimer right below the web benchmarks?joms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Guess what? I have never seen any comparison between iPhone 7 and flagship Android phone with SD821 where iPhone 7 is faster in app and browsing site. These benchmarks mean nothing if you are using different platforms particularly OS.Check out this comparison
https://youtu.be/mcTAXsFHu5I
gigathlete - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Check out this comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm8zC2VAr8wjoms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Bwaha PhoneBluff. Who launches 10 apps in a minute and close it right away with the home button? Retards?His finger is faster on the home button of iPhone than OP3T =D
TadzioPazur - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
This "test" is broken. Instead of measuring each activity individually, the test mashes them all together and measures total time. This makes no sense whatsoever - users are interested in doing one thing at a time, so individual tests somehow reflect perceived speed of the device.Measuring all together is not how we use these kind of devices. Especially that a lot of those activities reflect the mass storage sequential read. So all PhoneBuff needed to have done to show his beloved device was the fastest, was to put enough application load activities and leverage faster IO.
So I do think this "test" is so much worse than the above, posted by @joms_us.
gigathlete - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
There is individual load times per app at the end of the video did you finish the whole thing?techconc - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
@TadzioPazurThe "test" isn't broken. Rather, it's a measure of NAND storage performance rather than of the SoC.
grayson_carr - Saturday, March 25, 2017 - link
Kind of an unfair test. On Android, they completely disabled animations, so apps appear as soon as they are loaded, but on iOS there is no option for that. They claim they disabled animations on iOS, but they actually just enabled the reduce motion feature, which doesn't disable animations, but just changes them from a zoom to a fade animation.TadzioPazur - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
No. You seem to miss the point, as apperent from your post, comparing a SoC (835) to a complete product (6 month old phone). This is an important distinction, as pointed out by the editors: commanding victories in JS department come largely (if not solely) from the JS engine used by the browser.Let's nitpick the iPhone7s standings:
CPU tests: 8 x N/A, 3 x 1st (all JavaScript)
GPU tests: joint 1st, 2nd, N/A, N/A, 6, 2, 12, 1, N/A N/A, joint 1st
So iPhone is present on 10 graphs, being non-joint 1st ("trouncing everything else") on 4 of them. Hardly "most of graphs".
lefty2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
iPhone 7 scores 3306 in geekbench 4 single core, while the fastest android Samsung Galaxy S7 scores 1789 (https://browser.primatelabs.com/ios-benchmarks). So, yankeeDDL is correct, Apple's A10 trounces everything else (in single thread, which is the most important in a smartphone).joms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Except that Geekbench is worthless and does not represent real-world performance.melgross - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
No worse than any of the other tests such as PCMark. The importance is that all of these devices will perform about the same in real world use as they do in these tests.milli - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Geekbench is synthetic. PCMark tests with actual apps.joms_us - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Yep, PCMark is the best out there. It is doing real tasks, you can see what it is doing not just some random progress bar or percent like Geekbench LoL.arayoflight - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Geekbench scores shouldn't be compared across platforms since language used as well as the compiler can make a lot of difference.My old lenovo y510p scored 3600 single core on geekbench single core in Windows. When I booted in Ubuntu, the score jumped to 4400. Multi core scores were 11000 and 12500 respectively.
As evident, it's pretty pointless to compare it. Not to mention that almost all the tests can be done in L2 cache if it's sufficiently big. That's a really unrealistic test.
lefty2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
The iPhone 7 also scores a lot better in BaseMark OS II as well. At that stage we are looking at 3 benchmarks where iPhone trounces the best Android - although you can pick minor problems with each benchmark if you want - the overall picture is that the A10 performs better.joms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
A10 is better than SD821 by small margin in Basemark, SD835 will demolish it.lefty2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
I didn't see SD821, but the A10 beats SD820 by a huge margin (almost double):http://www.anandtech.com/show/10685/the-iphone-7-a...
joms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Check this one...http://www.gsmarena.com/oneplus_3t-review-1531p5.p...
Meteor2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
I thought the whole point of Geekbench was that it used specific compilers for each ISA specifically so it *is* comparable.melgross - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Yes, and that's important. Too many benchmarks, in order to have some kind of equivelance, don't compile specifically to a particular chip. They don't support specific functions, so it may not be a comparable test. They must support, and properly, all of the features of a chip family.BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
@lefty2: "So, yankeeDDL is correct, Apple's A10 trounces everything else (in single thread, which is the most important in a smartphone)."1) yankeeDDL did not make the single thread qualification that you made. Nor was any benchmark outside of this review mentioned. Therefore, yankeeDDL was not correct, regardless of the accuracy of your take on the situation.
2) You are using a single data point to disregard the entire benchmark suite here. Disregarding the perfectly legitimate reasons why the reviewers have chosen to leave geekbench out of the review suite, this still only gives the A10 one more win. Even then, you are purposefully leaving out the multi core data point, which puts the A10 only slightly ahead of Exynos 8890 in the Galaxy S7. I suspect, but can't confirm, that the A10 would lose to both the Kirin 960 and the Kryo 280. Yes, single threaded performance is important, but the Geekbench workload clearly isn't representative of all workloads.
Don't worry, the A10 isn't suddenly slow. It still ranks among the fastest SoCs on the market and is even still the top dog for certain senarios. Furthermore, platform optimizations and better use of APIs (see the javascript and basemark benchmarks) will likely hide any minor deficiencies until the A11(?) is released.
lefty2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
I disregard multi threaded because most smartphone apps don't use multiple threads. Even for desktop PCs, single threaded performance is more important that multi threadedDrumsticks - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Didn't anandtech do an analysis of Android a while ago and find pretty much the exact opposite? And that was like a year ago so it can only have gotten better since then.lefty2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
If they did, it must have been a very flawed analysis. Most people agree that single threaded performance is always the most important.Drumsticks - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
On iOS or Windows, sure. Android has widely different design parameters.Instead of just dismissing a 16 page analysis off hand, you should give it a read.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9518/the-mobile-cpu-...
Single threaded performance is King on iOS and windows. Android seems to very much prefer having access to many threads in a lot of use cases.
AnandTechReader2017 - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
Completely disagree for the Android OS.A nice thing Android does, if you'd like to try a simple java application, is that it automatically optimizes applications to use multiple threads even if you as a developer don't design it to do so. I noticed this the other day as I was building a quick prototype for a network application, whereby I just wanted to test it out, it never hit above 20% on each core (Android has a nice feature under Developer > Show CPU usage) even though the app should have frozen while waiting for the network thread to complete. Lovely libraries provided definitely have an impact on it and CPU developers take advantage of that fact when they create a CPU for an Android system, same thing that Apple does when it focuses on single-thread performance.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
They showed the Android browser using many threads. What was missing from my POV was the performance gain from these additional threads. One can assume Google woudln't do it like that if it wasn't worth, but I'd prefer measurements.lefty2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Browser use many threads to stop i/o requests from blocking the main thread, but those i/o are not doing any work, just waiting for the request to return from the server.melgross - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
No, what they found was that battery life wasn't effected. Sometimes using all cores gave a small boost to performance, and sometime it degraded performance. It's mostly marketing hype. The more the better.Gasaraki88 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
This so wrong... Phone apps are almost all multi threaded.tuxRoller - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
^|
That person knows what they are talking about.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
"most smartphone apps don't use multiple threads"Please show me the data backing up that statement.
melgross - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Multicore performance isn't real world on phones, and likely on tablets as well. Very few apps, almost none of them in fact, support more than two cores. Even when multitasking, something that isn't done on phones the way it might be on desktops, doesn't benefit terribly with more cores. And the legitimacy of using all big/little cores at once is even worse.Maybe, someday that will change, but not yet.
BurntMyBacon - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
I do think multicore performance is more important than you seem to believe, but as I said above, single core performance is also important. It is generally more important than multicore performance, but not so much that I can just dismiss multicore performance. The A10 still does well in most multithreaded use cases despite the lower number of cores.I've never been a fan of big.LITTLE anyways (particularly with the large clusters). It seems like the wrong way to handle the efficiency issue to me. Without going into a long discussion, I'll point out that the A9 (and predecessors) and Intel's lineup do just fine without it. If Android could assign tasks to individual cores based on need rather than swapping entire clusters in and out, then there may be some benefit to keeping background processes on low power cores to improve battery life and responsiveness of foreground applications, but you still wouldn't need a 4+4 configuration. In any case, that's a discussion for another time.
niva - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
You keep saying that it's not "real world" when earlier there were links provided that should be showing you that in the real world, today, multithread already matters, and having more real/virtual cores helps. This is all for the simplest and most used task for cell phones, web browsing, multi threading is quite useful. I'm fairly confident that if an Android manufacturer ran on hardware identical to the iPhone and outscored it across the board, you'll buy the iPhone anyways. Good for you but you're not helping in this discussion, just admit your apple fanboyism and bow out. Why do you even care about the SD 835?yankeeDDL - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Let me be more specific then.Web browsing is a key part of mobile experience. In the Kraken, WebXPRT and JetStream the performance difference is stunning: Kraken: 2.4X faster; WebXPRT: 1.35X faster, JetStream: 2.4X faster.
Yes, the difference is not only due to HW, but also to code optimization. Still: damn!
In the GPU department: in GFXBench, the performance is on-par (when reported).
There's a noticeable advantage of the S835 in 3DMark (1.4X Overall), but in Basemark we loose again by nearly 2X.
Yes, the comparison is (a bit) apples to oranges, but one has to admit that for a brand new SoC it would make sense to expect an hands-down victory over a noticeably older phone.
BurntMyBacon - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
@yankeeDDL: "Still: damn!"Agreed, Apple has a massive advantage in javascript benchmarks. It is impossible to say how much (if any) of that is due to the SoC vs the software stack, but the advantage is undeniable.
It is not unexpected that the A10 would win in Basemark. The A10 is making use of a low level API (Metal) where the SD835 is using a high level API (OpenGL ES). Again, Apple's better software cohesion and better use of APIs benefits them here. Still, the difference is quite formidable and the SD835 actually looses to the Kirin 960 as well. It would seem that the Adreno 540 is not well suited to this workflow. Therefore, it is unlikely that use of Vulkan will suddenly propel them ahead, but the gap would be a lot smaller. By the time use of Vulkan becomes common place, A11(?) will be out, so it's really a moot point.
The GFXBench Car Chase ES 3.1 / Metal chart title suggests it should have an Apple data point (only user of "Metal"). It'll likely show the same thing as the basemark test given the disparate APIs, but I'm still curious (though not critical without further considerations) as to why it wasn't included.
The fact that you can't get an A10 without iOS and you can't get iOS on another companies SoC makes considerations about whether it is better than the android SoCs or not a tertiary concern and academic when compared to the overall platform experience. There are plenty of reasons not to like an iProduct. Performance isn't generally one of them.
tuxRoller - Friday, March 24, 2017 - link
If you take into account Qualcomm's optimized browser, the differences relative to the iPhone 7 change to:(% better than the sd835)
Kraken: 140 -> 106 webxprt: 35 -> -26 jetstream: 140 -> 92
I'm sure they could do more, but I'd be amazed if the remaining differences in kraken & jetsteam were mostly due to software.
Despoiler - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
It's mostly the OS that Apple has superiority in. That's why they can use a dual core while Android phones are quad or octacore.grayson_carr - Saturday, March 25, 2017 - link
Isn't the A10 a quad core, or more correctly, a dual dual core big.LITTLE chip? Same as Snapdragon 820?akdj - Friday, March 31, 2017 - link
Yes, A10 is a quad-core big.LITTLE SoC, w/a 12-core GPU, I believe... as well, Apple on the 7+ added another GB of RAM = 3GB on an iOS phone, iPad 12.9" has 4GB -- but the iOS integration with the A10... as well, the last several generations of 'home brewed' ARM chips - and Apple's investments in silicon engineering from nVidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TI and others has paid dividends.That said, off Apple/AX chipsets for a second.... excellent 'first look' and factory/testing insight. That is very cool stuff!
I think, as geeks, and 'passionate' groups of faithful mobile phone OS folks amongst our population, folks who take this stuff more seriously than the Sunday sermon... we should all take a breath and remember that it's a 'chip preview'
Not an Android phone!
The issues with using the same chip on every device running Android --and every OEM 'skinning' their handset is a huge contributor to the varying performances; real world or objective bench tests. Like Windows as an OS on the desk and lap over the years, we've ALL had our 'Vista' moments. I'm an OS X/macOS user specifically because of 'vista and a curiosity about OS X in 2006 --- but again, I digress...
Qualcomm has built a chip able to be put in to every flagship other than iOS this year and 'compete' just fine. In the performance metrics all above are bickering about. But as an iPhone 7+ owner/lover (it's an excellent phone) -- my appreciation for the 835 goes well beyond its parity or near ...or exceeding metrics of CPU and GPU, they've built a gigabit LTE modem (who cares if you won't 'get that' - it's still gonna haul ass!) - incredible image processing and 'encryption/protection' with its iris scanning and biometric uses ...as well as the smaller node, the AIO model with all,parts of the 'brain' build in house --- IMHO, it's a 50-50 tie between chip engineering but I'm bias as an ambidextrous user since '07/'08 (iOS/Android) - I have always had one of each, the family is iOS and since switching everyone over, my workload has decreased 95%. It's vertical and horizontal integration and aggregation with macOS is, still to me, science fiction and for the family business... a God Send.
That said --- my S6 has an Exynos (sp?) processor, Note 4 was Qualcomm and, as I skip Android gens, my next will be a Qualcomm. I know as an iPhone 7+ owner I was delighted to learn that the model I bought has a Qualcomm modem, not the Intel;)
Special trip for you guys. Great write up and truly amazing to me ...I'm 45, born with the 8086 processor and the progress mankind has made in such a tiny package, which is high speed connected with exponentially more power than just a decade ago... in our pocket. We all need to remember between our friendly iOS/Android 'disputes' -- the special world we enjoy today specifically BECAUSE Apple and Google/Qualcomm/SnapDragons and their host of OEMs building what just a decade ago meant 110v, plugged in No mobility, significantly slower - even wired connectivity. None of the 'Millions' of free, $1, $5 & ten buck 'programs/software' then, apps, now - available on demand! Over 30 million song libraries, endless knowledge and tools, true magic is what I think the SD835 A10 Fusion and their predecessors are/were.
I'm old now, but not compared with the mountains I live in -- lucky enough to have spent the second ½ of my life quite literally watching these chips come to fruition ...I think it's the A10 when announced... it had/has over 3 billion transistors... and the SoC's the size of our fingernail!
Screw arguing. It's a competitive world and WE are the beneficiaries!
edlee - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
the 835 has a 10% stronger gpu than a10, its just nuts that apple, not being a cpu designer at heart, can design a better cpu/soc that is years ahead of of what arm and qualcomm can produceBedfordTim - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
There is a price/performance trade off with processors. Apple has chosen to make a much bigger processor which is why it is faster. Think Atom vs Core. One is slow but cheap and one is expensive and fast.Apple are not "years ahead". They have chosen to spend more on the processor.
Lord-Bryan - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
"They have chosen to spend more on the processor"They also had 64bit arm cores 2 years before Qualcomm released theirs, And that's is why they are year's ahead in performance and power efficiency
leexgx - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
64bit has not gave them any more speed (even apple said 64bit did not affect speed), more due to cpu and IOS optimisation (just lets them use 4gb later on )melgross - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
They are years ahead.zodiacfml - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Correct. Apple has the luxury with bigger chips/dies. Their dies are larger than Intel CoreGasaraki88 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
The A10 is still an ARM processor. They do their own tweaking of the hardware to make it good. They also have full control of the both the hardware and software stack so they can optimize them to work together efficiently.melgross - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Apple has an architectural license with ARM. They design their chips from the ground up. It's believed that they may have one with Imagination for the GPU as well.The advantage they have is that the OS developers work hand in hand with the hardware designers to optimize both the hardware and OS for each other. No one else can do that.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
As others have said, apple's design has been made with very particular goals in mind. Going wider and slower is, normally, more power efficient than narrower and faster, assuming you can actually feed the beast. You pay the cost in silicon and yield, however.ET - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Would be interesting to see Chrome results on all platforms. Using Chrome for Android and Safari for iOS is misleading. As the article said, Qualcomm's internal browser gets 280 in WebXPRT 2015, which trounces the iPhone 7's 208. (Though it's still slower in the other web benchmarks.)Achtung_BG - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
die size maybe less the 80mm2?prime2515103 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Just a suggestion...Since this is a preview of a chip, and not an actual phone review, I think it would be helpful if the model of the chip in each phone be put next to them in the charts instead of just the S7. It's quite inconvenient to have to go look it up while in the middle of reading the article.
With that said, I've noticed that mobile chips tend to vary a more widely from generation to generation than desktop parts seem too (they loose ground in certain areas, with big drops in the 20%+ range).
Is this a result of a compromise for power reduction, or are they just not as good at this yet as Intel?
StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
+1Would be also great if we could include other SoC's like Tegra.
jjj - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
You should have included some Atom and Core M results in the GPU charts as the SD835 will see some wins in Windows machines.Meteor2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Agree.joms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Seeing my Le Pro 3 there with the big boys on top, I think I will use it for now until the arrival of Le Pro 4 or 5 with SD836 ( overclocked version of SD835) =Djoms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
The results from this test is rather interesting. You can see a much faster results especially on graphics and browser tests.http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/03/22/qualcomm-s...
zodiacfml - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Interesting, 3.5 W for max load. I've seen the 810 from a previous article using 8W for three cores.MrSpadge - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Not max load. They said multiple times "fixed load", i.e. the faster SoC can run more relaxed.zodiacfml - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
thanks. I wouldn't thought of that.nitram_tpr - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Regarding the iris recognition and the comment about getting rid of the fingerprint sensor button from the front...why not just put it on the back. I use an Honor 7 and the fingerprint sensor is on the back and works really, really well there.Holliday75 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
My Nexus 5x has its sensor on the back as well. When I first ordered the phone I thought I would never use that feature. Now I absolutely love it.zodiacfml - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
In the end, it is a Kryo with a die shrink and a low power quad core. The GPu received a boost thoughdeathBOB - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Apparently you didn't read the article.Meteor2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Really good article. I wish you'd do GB4/MHz testing for Apple's ARM cores and for x86 chips though! And dump Kraken for Octane. The latter is much broader, isn't it?Couldn't you use Chrome on iOS to level the playing field a bit for JavaScript benchmarks?
Meteor2 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Actually ignore the Octane bit. I didn't realise JetStream included the Octane tests.Meteor2 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
I was having a bad day. Chrome on iOS uses WebKit and Nitro, just like Safari. So JS benchmark results are the same.lilmoe - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
"Qualcomm's Thoughts on Benchmarks versus End-User Experiences""And that means they need to promote and sell their SoCs as the sum of their parts, and not just a CPU with a bunch of extra stuff bolted on."
False. Only the CPU matters. Co-processors are a damn gimmick. GB and browser benchmarks FTW.
pSupaNova - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
False, Qualcomm has been able to see of competitors with their integrated modems, heterogeneous computing matters more in the mobile arena not geeky benchmarks.fanofanand - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Their modems are the reason manufacturers are willing to accept the "All or none" approach Qualcomm takes to IP licensing.lilmoe - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
youDontSay.gifjoms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Except that GB does not utilize all cores efficiently. Imagine the weakest core scored 2K and there are 7 more cores. The MC score of SD835 should be at least 10K minimum but it is not because GB is worthless. Think Cinebench, it scales linearly with the number of cores and it maximizes them all.mczak - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
I think saying "does not utilize all cores efficiently" is quite far off the mark. As far as I can tell there's two aspects why the mt score doesn't scale quite as much as you seem to expect:1) GB score is composited, being composed of int, float, memory. The former two would scale pretty much as good as it gets, but the latter (which has weight 20% of the total score) obviously does not.
2) It's not geekbench's fault that these smartphone socs can't reach max frequency on all cores simultaneously
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
What a load of nonsense. GB uses all cores efficiently and it scales just perfectly. You just have a severe misunderstanding of both of the SoC and how the GB score is composed. Calling it worthless just because you don't understand it just makes you look stupid.And just for the sake of education:
Just because there's 8 cores and the strongest SC score is 2K doesn't mean you can just take some multiplier number to get to the MC score. First of all 20% of both the SC and MC scores are composed of the memory performance which simply doesn't scale much if at all between SC and MC scenarios.
If you look at the integer and floating point sub-scores you see that they're pretty much as you expect. When they're not, it's because the SoC's top frequency is only valid for single-core loads and drops to a lower frequency when using more of them, something that the S835 seems to do.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Furthermore MT may run into bottlenecks not present in ST: cache sizes, memory bandwidth, internal busses and maybe more.joms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Nonsense, here is a task that 8 people can do if they all work together but only one is doing it 100%, the 2nd person 50-75% and the rest just 5-10% so they ended up finishing only half of it. That's how GB distributes load because of its pathetic threading and tasks distribution. Cinebench does it perfectly by distributing the rendering tasks in each core separately.You cannot say one SoC is weaker than another because GB is not maximizing its potential. Each core after then 2nd is just contributing about 500 points because they were useless throughout the testing.
joms_us - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
And FWIW, that 2K score is just from efficiency core i.e Core 0. That's the default core where GB always runs the Single Core test.Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
> And FWIW, that 2K score is just from efficiency core i.e Core 0. That's the default core where GB always runs the Single Core test.lol. You have absolutely no clue of what you're talking about.
Lord-Bryan - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Nah, the 2k is from the high performance core, geekbench can't just schedule a task to a particular core, that's the job of the scheduler in the the os. The highest performance core is always used to run large single threaded load.Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
> Nonsense, here is a task that 8 people can do if they all work together but only one is doing it 100%, the 2nd person 50-75% and the rest just 5-10% so they ended up finishing only half of it. That's how GB distributes load because of its pathetic threading and tasks distribution.Also lots blablabla: http://i.imgur.com/PaLP1xw.png
ah06 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Can you guys do a "What Ifs" short post on the expected changes if Apple went with an 8 core A11 or if Exynos/Snapdragon next iterations would score 3500 on Geekbench. What changes would we see where?joms_us - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Since you are good at it, why don't you log the freq and usage of GB in 5 runs and show us which Cores are being used heavily. Stop logging each run at around 25% and another set at 100%. And if you don't mind, what is the name of that usage app you've shown in the image? TIAAndrei Frumusanu - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
They're all at maximum frequency and 100% always when the workloads are kicking in. Stop wasting people's time with your nonsense claims. I proved my claims, your turn to prove yours. You can use Trepn.joms_us - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Well not quite 100% to me... Hell knows what background app is making those spikes and not Geekbenchhttp://i.imgur.com/IjBdsOHh.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/6FWmG5Jh.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/IjMsOjIh.jpg
Remember the news about benchmark cheating of Samsung and now Oneplus? What they did are perfectly valid because a worthless app like Geekbench does not measure the true IPC of the SoC if it can't maximize it. You go to Windows world, people will disable CnQ or Speedstep and Powernow just to make sure processor is running at 100% of frequency to measure true IPC.
P.S Thanks for the name of the app, I appreciate it!
realbabilu - Sunday, March 26, 2017 - link
I remember in Windows Pc,is hard to get all cores stay flat at 100% unless I got very good multithread multiprocessor designed program like Ansys or Abaqus. Means its very tough to get/program a software that can utilize all cores stay at 100%.
ah06 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Please stop posting, your understanding of SoCs is less than primary school level and you are talking to experts like Andrei........ah06 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Why are you on Anandtech? How old are you?Please do not post again
joms_us - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Oh some God from heaven, sorry for stopping by here.lilmoe - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
lol, I was literally being sarcastic in my comment. Looks like it stirred a lot of angry replies.- Geekbench does scale well across all cores. That's not the problem. Geekbench sucks as a benchmark for "absolute" performance of the CPU portion of an SoC (or platform like QC likes to call it) that matters for modern workloads. In addition to that, the way it calculates the totals and how the devs decide what sub-score counts more than what is absolute BS. Most of the workloads it tests are rarely dealt with the CPU and more commonly offloaded to co-processors. Yes, even on iOS devices. I find the compute portion of geekbench rather interesting, but it's rarely discussed by anyone.
- CPUs are getting less and less relevant in modern content consumption workloads. Offloading to co-processors, if at all possible, is the way to go. For instance, Intel's latest 7700K CPU (cpu only) pales in comparison to the least efficient 4K encoding/decoding block implementation on any modern platform, including ARM based SoCs. The same goes for image processing/manipulation, audio, speech recognition, security, etc, etc.... You know, the sub-tests that Geekbench performs.
- Interconnect, bandwidth, cache throughput and latency, and Scheduling play a huge part in the multi-core score of a CPU/SoC. Generally, the more cores you have, the harder and more power consuming it is to scale multiple threads across those cores, _especially_ on processors constrained with a 2-4 watt power envelope. Those caches are very power hungry and often limit scaling by 10-20% of ST even on non-power limited CPUs. That percentage is much, MUCH higher on ultra mobile ARM parts.
- In addition to those scaling issues, the Snapdragon 835, similar to Samsung's Exynos and HiSilcon's Kirin SoCs are big.LITTLE multi-cluster configurations. Typically, only 1 of these clusters is high performance, and only when you're running a single or couple of threads would the high performance cores reach their highest clocks. That's by design of ultra-low power, passively cooled parts. The Exynos 8890 gets up to 2.6Ghz in ST and 2.2Ghz in MT. Again, in addition to clock variance, you'll never get 8x ST since only 4 of those 8 cores are high performance. The smaller cores are nowhere near as powerful. I say they would count as Intel's virtual threads in their hyper threading (SMT), and should help to achieve better scaling by just a tiny bit.
So, yea. I was being sarcastic. I agree with Qualcomm. These modern ARM SoCs are very sophisticated and tricky to benchmark. Nothing about them is simple. What ultimately matters is how much time it takes them to complete a modern workload, and how much power they consume at that. The more of these workloads are offloaded to co-processors, the better.
For the CPU portion, what matters in a smartphone/tablet, first and foremost, is multi-core performance, and how much of that performance is sustained over time with the least amount of power consumption. ST performance is overrated doesn't matter, AT ALL, after a certain performance threshold IN MOBILE DEVICES. Split second javascript gains as a result of browser optimization or real ST lead of a particular SoC are irrelevant. Javascript doesn't exist in a vacume, it's part of a web page/app, and how long it takes a browser to fully load a page and render its content is what ultimately matters. Period.
tuxRoller - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
"I find the compute portion of geekbench rather interesting, but it's rarely discussed by anyone."Why is that the case?
Btw, this is a much better comment.
What you are saying is why relevant benchmarks don't exist for mobile devices (sub-laptops).
The issue, i believe, is that sites, largely, test these devices like small computers (bear with me). As such, they focus on cpu related tasks. Some sites include video recording/playback power usage, but none, tmk, include task traces that are taken from someone actually using a device.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
If all you care about is a running a headless server that can't communicate with the outside world, then, yeah!If you care about battery life and good performance, low power processors (microcontrollers or tiny a series cores used for handling interrupts or more general duties when in a low power state), dsps and gpus matter.
Do we need a hashtag?
prisonerX - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Yeah those graphics co-processors, what a joke.wardrive2017 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Again I am impressed by the Snapdragon 625 showing here in the cpu tests, particulary in the PC mark tests, not so much in the Javascript. Still performing much better than expected. The G5 plus is starting to look quite appealing assuming its tweaked the same ways the Moto z play iszeeBomb - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
Its that time of year again!name99 - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
"The [3DMark] Physics test runs on the CPU and is heavily influenced by how well an SoC’s memory controllers handle random access patterns. "No it isn't, at least not to an extent that matters in any modern CPU. Why do you keep posting this rubbish in review after review?
The source code is available for examination. It basically tests (frequency)*(number of cores) and is useless for learning anything beyond that. That's why it's always the only test in which Apple looks bad --- because Apple's running two cores as opposed to 4/6/8/10 on Android, and, at least in the past, those cores were under-clocked relative to the Android cores.
If people want to post the 3DMark Physics numbers, whatever, I don't care. But I do think doing so is a waste of reviewers' and readers' time --- there is simply no useful additional information provided by that benchmark.
The fact that 3DMark continues to push it (as opposed to the way GeekBench every year or two tries to respond to complaints and concerns about its benchmarks) tell you something about the relative professionalism of the two companies.
Matt Humrick - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
"It basically tests (frequency)*(number of cores)"Both of these are factors, but it's not the whole story according to the developer I spoke with at Futuremark. If you have additional information to prove your claim, please share it with me via email. My mind is always open :)
name99 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
I looked into this in detail years ago when there was a big kerfuffle about the iPhone 5S score.I'm not interested in spending another day doing the exact same thing. I'll just point out that what I am saying matches the data.
Sure, I'm not saying that THE ONLY THING is (frequency)*(number of cores), there's some small 5 to 10% variation around that; but that variation is unimportant --- the big picture is embedded in what I said.
Now, does this mean it's a good benchmark? Well, how much code that people care about is multi-threaded (on Android and otherwise)?
I'm not interested in relitigating that (given what I consider to be the astonishing incompetence and ignorance we saw on Anandtech the last time this was discussed, with a VAST proportion of readers apparently unaware of such concepts as timesharing, or how to accurately calculate the thread level parallelism of an executing piece of code).
I will say that the most recent academic papers I've read, dated 2016, referring to work in around 2014, show that it's higher than you might expect, not as high as you might hope. Across a very wide range of Android apps the thread level parallelism is slightly larger than 2, showing, basically (in my interpretation)
- an Android controlled thread doing misc stuff that's pretty busy
- a main app thread
- various small completion routines, async routines, and interrupts
So basically two cores get you almost all the value in real world core, a third core occasionally picks up a small amount of extra available work.
Now read what I am saying before getting upset. I'm NOT saying that ARM is stupid to ship 4 (performance) cores. ARM cores are tiny, they can be of (very occasional) value to a few talented developers today, and the only way we'll EVER get the mass market to code more parallel is to have the hardware out there as the default. So I'm happy that ARM is flooding the world with hexacore, octacore, decacore chips. (And I think Apple is being penny-wise and pound-foolish by not making every SoC they ship a triple core ala A8X --- the extra area would be small, and it would likewise provide an incentive for developers to get off their asses.)
But that's a different argument from whether core-count provides "visible performance" today.
I think the answer to that is clearly no. The first thing that matters to most users is snappiness (which depends, primarily, on flash performance, GPU [and the quality of the graphics code], performance governor (so does the CPU "start off" fast or "start off" slow and only get fast after .2 seconds of UI interaction? Then there are a few places where overall "endurance" performance matters (like much browser stuff, or viewing complicated PDFs --- both of which are very poorly threaded even as of 2017). Finally the cases where all cores all the time matters, and almost nothing else (the sort of thing 3DMark Physics is testing) are REALLY few and far between.
Or to put it another way. Most CPU microarchitecture improvement since 2000 has been about discovering and exploiting the stochastic structure of REAL-WORLD computation. There are re-uses and patterns in branching, in memory access, in instruction execution that are exploited ever more aggressively in branch prediction, in cache insertion and liveness tracking, in prefetching, in loop buffers, etc. A benchmark that prides itself on randomness and in providing no way for all those smarts to add value is saying SOMETHING about the worst case performance of a CPU, but it's not clear that that something is of any value to almost everyone.
Frenetic Pony - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
How disappointing that yet another of the very few custom CPU designers is now gone. Looking at the general performance of the CPU now, I see no reason whatsoever to choose Qualcomm over some other, generic ARM hawker that's probably cheaper. They could at least stop pretending and just become a module seller, selling their GPU/modems/etc. separately as there doesn't seem to be any reason to choose a Qualcomm SOC as a whole.Other than ditching their stock (if you haven't already) none of this looks good for Qualcomm. Or for ARM for that matter, the A73 doesn't offer any performance boost over the A72 and is still trounced by Apple. Maybe the rumors of Google building its own CPU will come true and we'll see it in the Pixel 2.
serendip - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
No reason? They're one of the few developer and open source friendly chip manufacturers around, even if that relationship ventures into frenemy territory once in a while. Qualcomm modems and imaging blocks are pretty good too.Intel are developer friendly but their GPUs can be an abomination to work with. They've also effectively abandoned the mobile space. Mediatek, Huawei and Samsung either give a cold shoulder or a middle finger to devs.
StrangerGuy - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
They dropped their own custom cores because why even bother when vanilla ARM does a better job while being cheaper...Plus the economics for a non-Apple, non-Samsung bleeding edge SoC no longer makes much sense, and 99.99% of the population buying these phones doesn't and won't give a shit to the SoC or the benchmarks.Meteor2 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
It wouldn't surprise me if Qualcomm had multiple core design teams competing with each other. We've seen ARM cores come before; maybe full-custom will come back next year.SyukriLajin - Thursday, March 30, 2017 - link
I think they are just shifting their focus. The fact that they "rebranded" the snapdragon as a platform instead of just processor is one indicator. SOC is more than just cpu cores and they want people to know that. My guess is, they think that investing more money to develop a more unique platform is more important than spending valuable time and money on redoing the cpu core, ARM already invested a tons of money to develop it, no reason to reinvent the wheel when you can use the resources to provide a platform that will help them be more different then the others. I think it's wise for them. The resources would better off be spent to create a better DSP, modem, GPU etc, which will give them more return than a custom cpu core.MrPhilo - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
So the Exynos 8895 GPU should in theory be faster than the 540 by quite a bit? Since the Huawei 9 uses 8, whereas Exynos uses 20, but of course with a lower clockspeed. I can see it being at least 20-30% faster than the 540.oranos - Wednesday, March 22, 2017 - link
people just create self driven narratives to support their own bias. there is no rationality in most of these commentsMario9290 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
QUALCOMM PROCESSORS ARE GARBAGE. WHY WE HAVE TO PAY FOR AN INFERIOR HANDSET WHEN COMES TO SAMSUNG? I STILL HAVE AN S6 EDGE PLUS 64GB. NEVER HAD A PROBLEM WITH. BUT IF SAMSUNG THINKS IMY GONNA BUY A CRAPPIE S8 PLUS WITH QUALCOMM SNAPDRAGON INSIDE . BETTER THINK AGAIN. QUALCOMM IS CRAPPIE ALL THE WAY. I DON'T CARE IF QUALCOMM PEOPLE DIES OF HUNGER. I EXPECT A QUALITY AND HIGH PERFORMANCE HANDSET. SO S8 PLUS WITH SAMSUNG EXYNOS 8895 IS THE ONE I WANT. STOP DISCRIMINATING AGAINST U.S.CONSUMERS. OR FUCK SAMSUNG.regis440 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
"I’ve noticed that GPU frequency remains close to idle.." should not be CPU?Matt Humrick - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
The sentence is correct. Part of the workload is run on the GPU.Meteor2 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
So Matt, Ryan, what were actual GB4 ST and MT scores?Diji1 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
TL;DR, but the first sentence shows you don't understand what bench marking is used for so who cares.darkchazz - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
I just ran geekbench 4 on my Nexus 9 and it's getting higher values than the SD835 in most of the integer and floating point tests.These Denver cores are begging to be put in a smaller efficient FinFet node.
Meteor2 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Sadly I think Nvidia are concentrating on computing for cars over tablet/Chromebook chips. Better returns I guess.Holliday75 - Thursday, March 23, 2017 - link
Recommendation for the comments section. Have the comments section automatically change the word loose to lose. It would correct quite a few grammar mistakes.Shadowmaster625 - Friday, March 24, 2017 - link
I love how the 835 looks so good until you stick an almost 2 year old iphone onto the chart. RIP.joms_us - Saturday, March 25, 2017 - link
And your iPhone with its pathetic 720 display looks crap and sluggish as hell in real world comparison.IlllI - Saturday, March 25, 2017 - link
AMD really missed the boat when they sold their mobile assets to Qualcomm. I often wonder what AMD could have done if they had invested in developing mobile tech all these yearsrealbabilu - Sunday, March 26, 2017 - link
Maybe will be the same as Intel atom mobile did.IlllI - Sunday, March 26, 2017 - link
intel tried years after all these other companies got established. If AMD had gotten in earlier, instead of selling off to Qualcomm, AMD might be Qualcomm todayajohntee - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Not very possible. Qualcomm is where it's at today because of its early involvement with the CDMA technology and the subsequent development of great Modem chips. They could spend R&D money on their own GPU and cores because of the money coming from selling the whole package including the modem. AMD never had it and seeing how nVidia is struggling still with mobile chips, it's unlikely AMD would've fared much better.SyukriLajin - Thursday, March 30, 2017 - link
regarding 3QA. i'm wondering if it requires special [hardware/firmware] support to use FDD and TD LTE together, or 3QA, by default, supports combining both types of LTE? (this is of course assuming all the other hardware requirement supports 3QA, and the carrier operates on both TD and FDD LTE. I'm wondering because one of the carrier in my country talked about combining both types to get the highest speed, but provides no info if any of the current phone will support it.peevee - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Why would not you just test Firefox everywhere? Better yet, Firefox with AdBlock installed, so the ads would be uniformly eliminated form the sites. This would allow to compare performance of iPhone hardware. Although the Safari test is also useful as it demonstrates more real life experience of iPhone users which is years ahead of even future Android phones unfortunately.Hrel - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
Memory copy, it shows the 821 as being faster yet you have it marked as negative and in red. Yet it's about twice as much bandwidth/second. So, the 821 is really superior in all the areas where it matters, camera performance, speech recognition and memory copy. I'd say the 835 is a pretty big failure. I'll be skipping that SOC entirely.Fix your article though yo.