No offence but how relevant is this review so many months after release? You guys dropped the ball on this one. We're also still waiting for the GTX 960 review.
Nothing has happened to AnandTech. We're still here and working away at new articles.=)
However this article fell victim to bad timing. The short story is that I was out sick for almost 2 weeks in December, which meant this got backed up into the mess that is the holidays and CES.
As for how relevant it is, it is still Google's premiere large format tablet and the only shipping Denver device, both of which make it a very interesting product.
It's fine to be late (although maybe not as late as the Razer Blade 2014 review!). Better to have late, differentiated content than early, commoditised content. Whether the review like's the colour of a tablet's trim is of limited interest for me; the details of Denver code-morphing are.
Actually my worry is that under new ownership Anandtech might be pushed to go down the publish early/get click views route vs. the publish late/actually deliver something useful. Hopefully it won't come to this, but this is what historically happens... :-(
Being there on day one is not a huge deal but its certainly not ok be as late as this review is or the still MIA 960 review. If you are going to be late you better be brining something new to the table to justify not being there in the same time frame as your peers. This is so laughably late its almost embarrassing to release it at all at this point.
Tech journalism like most other markets is competitive and there are lots of other very competent publications out there competing for the same readers. Personally I've already gotten all the Nexus 9 information elsewhere so this review is of no value to me whatsoever. The same goes for the 960 review when/if that review ever shows up.
Not sure where you've seen such an extensive write up and dissection of Denver, but I certainky haven't. Nor were the N9/6 widely available until the holidays were over. Like a month ago For every 10,000,000 iPads produced, HTC is probably knocking out 10,000 Excellent review, write up and information about the 'other 64bit' option.
Timing is secondary for a deeply technical article like this here. You guys did exactly the right thing, reporting when the device was announced and waited for the review to be done before publishing. Also, having people out sick in a small team is something you really can't do that much about. I hope you're well now.
The article itself was superb. Thanks for the read and keep up the good work.
2nd that. I am not here to read about how fast the tablet is or how nice it looks. i am here for in depth content about the chip. would it be nice that this content was available since the release of the product? absolutely, but given the resource it would either be a brief review that is going to be the same as review you can find from hundred of other websites, or late but in depth. honestly i think anand should be targeting at more tech oriented contents that's few but in depth, and leave the quick/dirty review for other websites.
Yeah but who cares about tablets??!! I don't come to Anandtech to read about budget tablets, or SFF PCs, or more smartphones. The Denver coverage was not even that in depth TBH, just commentary on the NVidia slides. I have a EE degree and some of the previous write ups were so in depth they could be class material. This one isn't which is fine but I don't think it excuses how late it came out. The enthusiast market is growing and you should be targeting that demographic as you previously have, not catering to the mainstream like hundreds of sites already do.
The enthusiast market is growing ? What with CPU's not really getting, or needing to be any faster for several years now, and a standard mid range quad core i5 (non-overclocked) being WAY more than powerful enough to run 99.9% of anything out there, how is the enthusiast market is growing? Most enthusiasts I know don't even bother any more... There just isnt a need. Any basic PC is great these days.
I totally agree with you. That doesn't change the fact that the market is growing as more users are adopting gaming PCs. Enthusiasts now actually command a sizable portion of desktops sold. Intel's Devil's Canyon was in response to that.
I guess I am still in a mind set where a PC "enthusiast" is your overclocker, tweaker, buying the latest and fastest of everything to eek out that extra few frames per second.
Today, a mid range quad core i5 from 3 years ago and a decent mid-high range card runs any game quite nicely.
There was a time, readers may be too young to have been there, when there was a Wintel monopoly: M$ needed faster chips to run ever more bloated Windoze and Intel needed a cycle-sink to soak up the increase in cycles that evolving chips provided. Now, we're near (or at?) the limits of single-threaded performance, and still haven't found a way to use multi-processor/core chips in individual applications. There just aren't a) many embarrassingly parallel problems and b) algorithms to turn single-threaded problems into parallel code. I mean, the big deal these days is 4K displays? It looks prettier, to some eyes, but doesn't change the functionality of an application (medical and such excepted, possibly).
Does anyone really need an i7 to surf the innterTubes for neater porn?
I think the chip coverage was superb, I don't have an EE degree and I'm pretty sure that's what the website is steered towards. And I still think I got it.
It's fascinating the number of layers involved in this Android tablet, and speaks to why Apple can optimize so much better. There's the chip->NVIDIA chip optimizer->executable code->Dalvik compiler/runtime->dalvik code. I mean, when the lags are encountered, that's twice as many suspects to investigate.
I still think that the review is a little harsh on Denver. It's hitting the right performance envelope at the right price. While it's an mildly inefficient design, clearly NVIDIA is pricing it accordingly, and that might be a function of moving some of the optimization work to software. And that's work that Apple and MS do all the time - Apple much more successfully, obviously. There's a real gap in knowledge of how efficient Apple's chips are vs how optimized the software/hardware pairing is.
I have no interest in tablets, but the deep dive on Denver was a fascinating read, and still completely relevant even if the product is a few months old. Thanks for the great review.
Hi, outstanding article with incredible attention to detail... Do you think its possible to run Dynamic Code Optimizer on per say 2 or maybe even 4 small cpu cores dedicated to doing all the software OoOE functions instead of using time slicing? (A53s or just some XYZ narrow cores for a potential 2+2 or 4+4 or maybe even 8+8)
Also whats the die size of a denver core in comparison to a enhanced cyclone core?? That is where a lot of gains are possible potentially 30%-50%..
Ryan, you should neglect the whiners. I have never seen such negative feedback from people towards a forum/website (well, maybe VB5 forums). Just keep on providing thorough, quality reviews like always.
It does seem like you guys have more and more articles that "fall victim to bad timing" as time goes on. It really does sound like you need to hire a couple-a few more people. Reviews of the depth you guys do are very time consuming, we all know and appreciate this fact. So you're faced with a decision, allow quality to continue declining or re-invest to bring it back up to it's peak.
Come on now. They've never been the fastest to push reviews out, but are almost always the most in depth. Look at all the detail on Denver here. I find it a better model than pushing out day one vapid reviews, personally.
The price is a joke. The storage silly and the 'app' selection Reminds me of Detroit. There's other options at 3/499 with REALLY 'decent value'. N9 ain't it
Why, is the Nexus 9 no longer available? Actually I'm glad it's late but not as superficial as the other stuff, which was delivered on time, but all had little to say, except that the software didn seem quite ready yet.
Anandtech have always prioritised quality, insight and being correct, over being the first to press. It's why a giant chunk of its readerbase reads it. This is going to be relevant and timely to 90% of people who purchase the Nexus 9. It's also likely to be the definitive article hardware and tech wise produced anywhere in the world.
I'd call that a win. I just think there's no pleasing everyone, particularly the 'what happened to AT????!? crowd' that's existed here perpectually. You remind me of the Simcity Newspaper article 'naysayers say nay'. No: Yea.
You must be new around here. Anandtech was always quite a bit slow to release their mobile hardware reviews; the quality has always been consistently higher in turn.
C'mon guys. This isn't the freakin Verge or Engadget review. If you want fancy photos and videos with the technical part saying how much RAM it has, go to those sites.
The gift of Anandtech is the deep dive into the technical aspects of the new SoC. That ability is very exclusive and the reason that Anandtech is still the same site.
I remember that the Nexus 5 review came out so late and that was by Brian Klug, so it's really nothing unusual here. This review covers so much about Denver that wasn't mentioned elsewhere that I won't mind at all if it was coming late. Reviews like this one (and the Nexus 5 one to a lesser extent, or the Razer Blade 2014 one) are so extensive that I won't mind reading them months after release. The commentary and detailed information in them alone make them worth the read.
The review is relevant. The tablet market landscape hasn't been changed much between then and now. Anyone in the market for a Nexus 9 or similar tablet is going to evaluate it against what was available at the time of release.
I've got to agree, Anandtech have dropped the ball on this one. I always prefer to wait and read the comprehensive Anandtech review which I understand can take a few weeks, but this is simply to long to get a review out on a flagship product. Call me sceptical but I can't see such a situation occurring on the review of a new apple product.
High end my rear end. HTC has made high end tablets, HTC makes high end devices, Google makes high end companies make garbage. Seriously. Google devices are done.
So regardless of how nice the hardware it Android (and more importantly most of its apps) still have major issues when it comes to tablets.
Why waste time buying this stuff when you can get a Windows 8 tablet?
I get the best of both tablet and PC worlds in one device without being held hostage by lord overseer Apple dictating my every move or Androids crappy support and busted app ecosystem.
there's no Windows 8 tablet out there for the same price,with same quality screen and snappiness as this one or Apple tablets. The closest would be Surface3 but it's much more expensive.
If you happen to know about any please post some links please.
Because a Windows 8 tablet is worse than a tablet when it comes to tablet user experience and worse than a notebook when it comes to notebook experience. Most people like to have two separate devices rather than owning a product that tries to combine everything. For some people this works but the majority prefers two product.
not necessarily if done right. Lenovo Yoga comes probably the closest with its hybrid(tablet +notebook). It need to be much cheaper if it wants to be acquired by majority though.
I don't think that's true at all. Most people would probably prefer to only pay for one device. The issue is one more of execution than concept. If the surface pro 3 were as light, thin, and as good on battery as high end tablets I certainly would have bought one. At a premium even.
It that were true MS wouldn't be able to keep Surface on the shelves and the market for x86 Atom hybrids at <$500 would be comprised of more than a handful of OEM & models...
I think for a certain class of individuals it makes all the sense in the world; students, business travelers, etc. For most people however it's just a compromise on both form factors and not really much of a money saver (specially when you factor the upgrade cycle into the equation).
I have a Windows 8.1 tablet (not RT). It's the worst tablet interface I've used yet. A total bomb. And the touch apps and selection are universally awful.
If it didn't have "classic" Windows desktop, I'd have sent it back to the store.
I find the 4:3 aspect ratio a turn off. Why change now. There are zero apps natively designed for this in the Android ecosystem. Why would a developer make a change for one device? It just seems like more fragmentation for no reason. I'm picking up a Shield Tab soon.
One example to drive my point: I bought kingdom rush and found out that on my widescreen tablet, the game won't fit the screen properly. If any, this will fit apps previously designed for ipads well. Hate to admit it, but apple has such a huge lead in the tablet market it's just reasonable for developers to focus on them first.
Well, there are almost no tablet apps at all for Android. One reason is because of the aspect ratio being the same for phones and tablets. Why bother writing g a tablet app when the phone app can stretch to fit the screen exactly? Yes, they're a waste of time, but hey, it doesn't cost developers anything either.
Maybe goi g to the much more useful 4:3 ratio for tablets will force new, real tablet apps.
It's one reason why there are so many real iPad apps out there.
There will be more tablets coming with 4:3 screen. Samsung's next flagship tablet will be 4:3. As much as I like watching movies on a wide screen, I think it's not the killer tablet application for most users, and most people will benefit from having a more balanced 4:3 screen. It works better for web browsing, ebooks, and productivity apps.
Most simpler apps just scale fine one way or the other... I think 4:3 makes a ton of sense for larger tablets, it remains almost exactly as tall in landscape mode (which a lot of people seem to favor, and I find bizarre) and more manageable in portrait since it's shorter.
7-8" & 16:9 is still my personal preference, since I mostly use it for reading in portrait. Try to think outside of your personal bubble tho... I bought the Nexus 9 for my mother who prefers a larger tablet, never watches movies on it, yet almost always uses it in landscape.
It'll be perfect for her, shoot, it even matches the aspect ratio of her mirrorless camera so photos can be viewed full screen, bonus.
I personally think about the reverse. Big tablets with 9-11 screens are often bought for media consumption. Because of that, it makes sense for them to come with a wide screen. For me, having wide screen for watching movies on the flights and in the gym was one of the prime reasons to buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5, even though its benchmarks look only so so.
However, a 9 to 11 inch tablet is too bulky to hold in one hand and type with another. It almost begs for a stand. So for casual use, like casual web browsing or ebook reading, a smaller tablet with a 4:3 screen works better. And so I went ahead and got a tablet with 4:3 screen for that purpose.
Valid points, obviously usage cases can differ a lot, that's the nice thing about Android tho... It doesn't have to conform to any one aspect ratio that won't fit everyone's taste.
I love the 4:3 aspect ratio. I primarily use tablets in Portrait Mode, and have always disliked the "tall and thin" Portrait Mode of traditional android tablets. This is the main area where Google has always fallen behind Apple, IMHO. This is the main reason I gave my Nexus 7 (2013) to my nephew and bought a Nexus 9, and I have no regrets.
Agreed. I understand that YMMV and all that, but to me, large widescreen tablets are simply unusable in portrait. I'd love to have the choice of a 3:2 Android tablet though.
I am a little perplexed by this comment. A typical user will be on the web 90% of time. Not only the web browser does not need to be natively designed or optimized for any screen ratio, but it also will be more usable on a 4:3 screen. So will the productivity apps. The only disappointment for me on the 4:3 screen would be with watching the widescreen videos or TV shows. Moreover, there is quite a bit of evidence than a lot of the next generation tablets will be 4:3. Samsung's next flagship tablet supposedly will be 4:3.
Anandtech is becoming more and more boring last year. Sparse on reviews, short on tech comments, lacking on depth and enthusiasm. I can see Anandtech has become a just job for you guys, not the passion it was for Anand :-) And yes, his absence is definitely noticeable.
Was the Denver deep-dive not sufficient enough? Always welcome for comments. As for timing, see Ryan's comment above. We've actually had a very good quarter content wise, with a full review on the front page at least four out of every five weekdays if not every weekday.
Why not to post on your forum some sort of suggestion box/poll where all could say what should get reviewed first so some folks won't cry where is the review of their favorite toy :) ?
Because they'll still cry regardless, and they can't possibly work entirely based on readers' whim, doesn't make sense logistically or nor editorially... Readers might vote on five things ahead of the rest which all fall on the same writer's lap, they won't all get reviewed before the rest, or readers might not be privy to new hardware because of NDAs or cases where Anandtech can't source something for review.
While I enjoyed the review, I would've loved to have seen the kind of code driven analysis that was done with Swift. In particular, how long does it take for dco to kick in. What is the IPC for code that NEVER gets optimized, and conversely, what is the IPC for embarrassingly instruction-wise parallel code? Since it's relying on ram to store the uops, how long does the code need to run before it breaks even with the arm decoder? Etc.
The in-depth analysis of Denver is uniquely Anandtech, because you can't get that anywhere else.
And while Charly D. is very entertaining, the paywall is a bit of an impediment and I quite like again the Anand touch of trying to be as fair as possible.
I was and remain a bit worried that there seems to be no other platform for Denver, which typically signals a deeper flaw with an SoC in the tablet and phone space.
While I'm somewhat less worried now, that Denver might be acceptable as a SoC, the current Nexus generation is no longer attractive at these prices, even less with the way the €/$ is evolving.
It is clear, even though you did not say, why no one other than NV and Google will use Denver in their products. Thank you for the coherent review, Ryan.
P.S. I can't wait for the day SunSpider, Basemark, and WebXPRT disappear from your benchmark suit.
You always make those kind of claims about dual core vs more cores but you have never attempted to back them up with real world perf and power testing. In real use there are alerts and chats and maybe music playing and so on. While your hypothesis could be valid or partially valid you absolutely need to first verify it before heavily insisting on it and accepting it as true. Subjective conclusions are just not your style is it, you test things to get to objective results. And it wold be easy you already have "clean"numbers and you would just need to run the same benchmarks for perf and power with some simulated background activity to be able to compare the differences in gains/loses.
It's not measurable in a traditional sense, as the DCO will kick in at some point. However I'd say it's somewhere along the lines of A53, though overall a bit better.
The design philosophy of the DCO does make a lot of sense. When your mobile device starts to bog down and you start cursing at it, what is it usually doing? It is usually looping or iterating through something. The DCO wont help with small blocks of code that execute in 500uS, but you dont need help with that sort of code anyway. What you want to improve is exactly the type of code the DCO can improve: the kind of code that takes several dozen milliseconds (or more) to execute. That is when you begin to notice the lag in your cpu.
please update the charts with the bench results of the newer version of Androbench 4: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.... (I had previously commented on the fact that you can't safely compare the i/o results of different OS AND different bench apps).
Androbench 4 is redesigned it to use multiple i/o threads (as a proper i/o bench app should have) and produces vastly improved results on both Lollipop and earlier Android devices.
You will not be able to compare the newer results with older ones, but at least it will put an end to this ridiculus ι/ο performance difference between iOS and Android, the one you persistently -but falsly- keep projecting.
I tested this out on several of my devices and could see only minor improvements, all within 10%. The performance difference to iOS devices does not seem to be a dupe at all.
Well, your results are far far more improved than 10% Andrei says. 3 devices by 2 different users, all showed vast improvements (10-500%). Only they refuse to acknowledge it. Who knows, it seems Anandtech guys are on Apple's payroll...
Just wanted to note that on the NAND performance front, I believe the android devices which beat the nexus 9 in sequential speed use emmc 5.0 while the nexus uses a high quality emmc 4.5. I think this is because the tegra K1 SoC does not support emmc 5.0.
Better late than never, although being this late is indeed a big letdown.
Onto the hardware, looks like Denver is an interesting first custom SoC from Nvidia. Solid in some respects, lacking in others. I think it's a solid building block from which to work on and improve. I hope Nvidia continues the custom ARM core path and gets more design wins (if warranted) moving forward.
The Denver chip design is pretty interesting, but it reminds me very strongly of another mobile-targeted chip that didn't do well in the marketplace; the Transmeta Crusoe.
Both are VLIW designs with in-order execution, both rely on software code translation that runs on the CPU itself. Both even used a partitioned section of system ram as a translated ops cache.
The most significant difference that I see between them is the addition of a native ARM decoder to the Denver CPU; the Crusoe didn't have a native X86 decoder and relied on the dynamic translation for all code that it executed.
I had a Crusoe for a while in a Sony Vaio; it was used in some of the very small/lightweight ultraportable laptops by Japanese manufacturers for a while.
Crusoe lost because Transmeta woke the sleeping giant Intel to the value of low-power, and then a group of 100 people couldn't keep up the resulting engineering race. The x86 world would be a pretty different place today if that hadn't occurred. But I'd say the jury is still out on the overall capability of the VLIW + morphing approach.
It's 3 months late, the nexus 9 was released on the 3rd of November!!
No excuses, but it's just too late to help people make an informed decision!! Just like dog years, one year for a tablet is like 7 technology(dog) years!!
Apparently... Although getting the review in before February would've shut all these people up, cheapest place to get the Nexus 9 all thru the holidays was Amazon ($350 for 16GB) and they gave you until January 31 to return it regardless of when you bought it.
Only reason I'm so keenly aware is I bought one as a February birthday gift, opened it last weekend just to check it was fine before the return window closed... Not much backlight bleed at all even tho it was manufacturerd in October (bought in late December), some back flex but it's going in a case anyway.
What does the month of manufacture have to do with the back light bleed? You don't actually believe those "revision" rumors, do you?
If you do, consider how practical it is for a hardware revision to come out 1 month after release. Then consider how one set of pictures on a Reddit post proves anything other than that their RMA worked as intended.
I have following issues with your review: 1. You run webbrowser tests and derive CPU performance from it. That's nonsense! It's a web-browser test, and it won't be a CPU test whatever you do. If you want to test raw CPU performance you have to run native CPU test applications.
2. Your battery life analysis is based on false assumptions and you derive doubtful claims from it. The error is quite evident on the iPad Air test. In your newly introduced white display test, with airplane on, CPU/GPU idling, etc. the iPad Air 2 has a battery life of 10:18 hours. Now in your web-browsing battery test with WiFi on and the CPU busy, the iPad Air 2 has a battery life of 9:76 hours. That's a difference of 4%. The Nexus 9 has a difference of 30%, the Note 4 15%, the Shield Tablet 25%. You conclude: The Tegra K1 is inefficient. But I could also conclude that the A8 is inefficient and the Tegra K1 very efficient. The Tegra K1 needs significantly less power while idling, compared to the A8, which consumes always the same, mostly independent on the load. So finally, the A8 lacks any kind of power saving mode. That's abstruse, but the consequence of your test. Or maybe your test is flawed from the beginning on.
3. " I suspect we’re looking at the direct result of the large battery, combined with an efficient display as the Nexus 9 can last as long as 15 hours in this test compared to the iPad Air 2’s 10 hours." Sorry, but I don't get this either. The Nexus 9 has a 25.46 WHr battery, the iPad Air 2 a 27.3 WHr battery (+7%). The Nexus 9 has a 8.9" Display, the iPad Air 2 a 9.7". (+19% area). The resolution is the same, thus the DPI on the Nexus 9 higher. The display techonoly is the same, as you said in your analysis. So the difference must be related to something else, like a highly efficient idle SoC in the Nexus 9.
The battery life tests analysis is based on true facts on the technical workings of the SoC and its idle power states and we are confident in the resulting conclusions.
Going along with what Andrei said, an SoC isn't "efficient" if it's doing no work -- the A8 may not have idle power as low as the K1-64, but when you're actually doing anything more with the tablet in question is when efficiency matters. It's clear that the Air 2 wins out over the Nexus 9 in some of those tests (GFX in particular). Doing more (or equivalent) work while using less power is efficient.
Imagine this as an example of why idle power only matters so far: if you were to start comparing cars on how long they could idle instead of actual gas mileage, would anyone care? "Car XYZ can run for 20 hours off a tank while idle while Car ZYX only lasts 15 hours!" Except, neither car is actually doing what a car is suppose to do, which is take you from point A to point B.
The white screen test is merely a way to look at the idle power draw for a device, and by that we can get an idea of how much additional power is needed when the device is actually in use. Also note that it's possible due to the difference in OS that Android simply better disables certain services in the test scenario and iOS might be wasting power -- the fact that the battery life hardly changes in our Internet WiFi test even suggests that's the case.
To that end, the battery life of the N9 is still quite good. Get rid of the smartphones in the charts and it's actually pretty much class leading. But it's still odd that the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet and iPad Air 2 only show a small drop between idle and Internet, while N9 loses 33% of its battery life.
Idle power is pretty important for real world use for tablets, for example where you are reading something and the system is just sitting there. Those "load web page then pause for xx time" test would probably be really good for measuring.
That's exactly what our Internet test does, which is why the 33% drop in battery life is so alarming. What exactly is going on that N9 loading a generally not too complex web page every 15 seconds or so kills battery life?
I don't know if it would change this conclusion, but load-every-15-seconds is still only testing "screenager" behavior. For example while I'm reading this comments page it's a lot longer than 15 seconds. More like 30 seconds, scroll, 30 seconds, scroll, 5-10 minutes load another. Reading e-books is another low-intensity usage. Not saying that gaming and other continuous usage patterns aren't out there, but a lot of what people say they use tablets for is lower intensity.
You guys really need to stop using that gray/black surface for the background to show off your black devices. It really makes it hard to see the details.
It's a shame that NVidia couldn't get Denver out on a smaller process at launch. They're giving the A8 a run for it's money, but the 28nm process is killer at this point.
"it seems to be clear that an all-metal unibody design would’ve greatly improved the design of the Nexus 9 and justified its positioning better."
I don't quite agree. This article mentions several times the author's wish for full-body aluminum design, but as someone who already has a tablet with a nearly full aluminum body I do have to point out that it tends to be quite slippery in one's hands; you need a much tighter grip just to hold it without it slipping and this makes it tiring to hold in the long run. A tablet with a sort of rubbery, non-slip back won't look as pretty, but it will certainly be much more comfortable and I definitely would choose practicality over looks.
Also metal blocks wireless signal. Asus Transformer Prime has abysmal wifi and GPS reception because of that. There is no rational advantage to metal cases. Only looks, which is debatable.
Aye, my tablet had that issue. Luckily it's easy to open up and replace the antenna with a stronger one, something that helps, but not all tablets are that easy to open or have a replaceable antenna.
Metal would also make it heavier... Plastic doesn't have to mean back flex, it's just a design/QC issue they didn't address. My OG TF had a textured plastic back that was pretty solid, several years ago. It still creaked a little but it was mostly because of the mating of the back to the metal frame, no flex tho.
I wonder if nVidia is "crazy enough" to develop a runtime that would JIT from android bytecode directly to denver. As it is, there are two layers of compilation going on, if ART could by swapped by an nVidia runtime things could get really interesting!
The browser tests are pretty worthless as it is but they are made even more worthless by the omission of version information. If AnandTech is going to include Javascript benchmarks they should at least include the browser version. What version of Chrome are you running on each device? There have been pretty dramatic improvements in Chrome on Android over the past year.
Tablets are designed to be portable so why do designers never consider the needs of people on the move who may not have access to the cloud (either at all or at prohibitive cost). With 128 mb MicroSD card I can store tons of music, movies, tv shows and watch when I like on holiday
They want you to pay royalties to store your stuff in the cloud. I agree that 16GB is somewhat limiting. Half of that space will be used by the OS and applications, with barely anything left for user's data. I'd go with the 32GB model at the very least.
Ryan, I noticed that the Nexus 9 offers always-on (screen-off) Google Now activation. I checked in CPUSpy (and other apps) and noticed that even when all cores are parked, this feature works, suggesting that NVidia may have included a custom DSP or third core for audio processing. The +1 core in NVidia's Tegra platform was apparently transparent to the operating system, because it never showed up in CPU activity monitor apps.
If it is a custom DSP used for natural language processing, this would probably run afoul of Qualcomm's lock on the IP. Which might explain why NVidia never announced a third core (or DSP) in the Denver platform.
I'm not sure if it's just my imagination at work -- can you confirm or disprove (or speculate) on the existence of a third core? Supposedly Android 5.0 includes support for idle-state audio processing, but only if supported by the hardware. But it would seem hardware support would require some kind of low-energy state processing core. And nothing of the sort appears in NVidia's press releases.
By the way, thank you for the amazingly detailed and insightful review. You guys are amazing.
Always-on voice activation is done by the audio SoC and has no connection to the main SoC or any DSP. Qualcomm's voice activation is done via the audio chip.
Thanks. I have no doubt that's true, but I can't track down a reference. Anandtech's own article on the subject refers to Motorola's implementation of idle-state audio processing as relying on the X8's low-power cores, dedicated to handling audio processing.
Motorola's press release claimed that their X8 included proprietary "natural language" and "contextual" processing cores (which I thought were some kind of analog-to-digital audio-processing DSP, but may be wrong), which allowed for always-on activation of Google Now.
I can count the number of devices that support screen-off Google Now on one hand. The relatively small number of devices with this feature is perplexing. Or maybe no one advertises it?
While turning a GPU into a CPU is a great accomplishment then essentially built a CPU that seems designed to benchmark well but will stall endlessly on real world code.
This article is soooo late, clearly you should have just thrown up a half-page blurb with a clickbait title and was shallow enough that it could have just been written hands-off from the tech specs.
/s
Great read as always. Good things are worth waiting for.
I really appreciate the depth that this article has, however, I wonder if it would have been better to separate the in depth CPU analysis for a separate article. I will probably never remember to come back to the Nexus 9 review if I want to remember a specific detail about that CPU.
Has nVidia exposed that they would provide a static version of the DCO so that app developers would be able to optimize their binaries at compile time ? Or do these optimizations rely on the program state when they are being executed ? From a pure academic point of view, it would be interesting to see the overhead introduced by the DCO when comparing previously optimized code without the DCO running and running the SoC as was intended.
Nice in depth review as always, came a little late for me (I purchased one to gift it, which I ironically haven't done since the birthday is this month) but didn't really change much as far as my decision so it's all good...
I think the last remark nails it, had the price point being just a little lower most of the minor QC issues wouldn't have been blown up...
I don't know if $300 for 16GB was feasible (pretty much the price point of the smaller Shield), but $350 certainly was and Amazon was selling it for that much all thru Nov-Dec which is bizarre since Google never discounted it themselves.
I think they should've just done a single $350-400 32GB SKU, saved themselves a lot of trouble and people would've applauded the move (and probably whined for a 64GB but you can't please everyone). Or a combo deal with the keyboard, which HTC was selling at 50% at one point anyway.
That tells me you are mistreating your batteries. You think it's coincidence that it's happening to all your devices? Do you know how easy it is for batteries to degrade when over heating? Do you know every battery is rated for a certain number of charges only?
Mostly you want to avoid heat, especially while charging. Gaming while charging? That's killing the battery. GPS navigation while charging? Again, degrading the battery.
Each time you discharge and charge the battery you are using one of it's charge cycles. So if you use the device a lot and charge it multiple times a day you will notice degradation after a year. This is not unique to Google devices.
Even though I personal have 6 tablets ( 2 iPads, 2 Windows 8.1 and 2 android ) and as developer I find them technically inferior to Actual PC - except for Windows 8.1 Surface Pro.
I recently purchase an Lenovo y50 with i7 4700 - because I desired AVX 2 video processing. To me ARM based platforms will never replace PC devices for certain applications - like Video processing and 3d graphics work.
I am big fan of Nvidia GPU's but don't care much for ARM cpus - I do like the completion that it given to Intel to produce low power CPU's for this market
What I really like to see is a true technical bench mark that compare the true power of cpus from ARM and Intel and rank them. This includes using extended instructions like AVX 2 on Intel cpus.
Compared this with equivalent configured Nvidia GPU on Intel CPU - and I would say ARM has a very long way to go.
But a lot depends on what you doing with the device. I am currently typing this on a 4+ year old Macbook Air - because it easy to do it and convenient. My other Windows 8.1 ( Lenovo 2 Mix 8 - Intel Adam Baytrail ) has roughly the same speed - but Macbook AIR is more convenient. My primary tablet is the Apple Mini with Retina screen, it is also convent for email and amazon and small stuff.
The problem with some of bench marks - is that they maybe optimized for one platform more than another and dependent on OS components which may very between OS environments. So ideal the tests need to native compile for cpu / gpu combination and take advantage of hardware. I don't believe such a benchmark exists. Probably the best way to do this get developers interested in platforms to come up with contest for best score and have code open source - so no cheating. It would be interesting to see ranking of machines from tablets, phones, laptop and even high performance xeon machines. I also have an 8+ Year old dual Xeon 5160 Nvidia GTX 640 (best I can get on this old machine ) and I would bet it will blow away any of this ARM based tablets. Performance wise it a little less but close to my Lenovo y50 - if not doing VIDEO processing because of AVX 2 is such significant improvement.
In summary it really hard to compare performance of ARM vs Intel machines. But this review had some technical information that brought me back to my older days when writing assembly code on OS - PC-MOS/386
Maybe I missed it, but can you comment on browser performance in terms of tabs staying in memory? I had a Note 10.1 2014 for a brief time, and I found that tabs had to reload/refresh constantly, despite the 3GB of RAM. Has this gotten any better with the Nexus and Lollipop? Through research, I got the impression it was a design choice in Chrome, but I wondered if you could figure out any better. Say what you want about Windows RT, but my old Surface 2 did a good job of holding more tabs in RAM on IE.
Lollipop has memory management issues right now, as was mentioned in this very article. Apps are cleared from memory frequently after certain amount of up time and reboots are required.
There have been reports of a hardware refresh to address the buttons, light bleed, and flexing of the back cover. There was no mention of this in this article. What was the build date on the model that was used for this review? Is there any truth to the hardware refresh?
Also, Lollipop is supposed to be getting a big update to 5.1 very soon. Will this article be updated with the new Lollipop build results? Will FDE have the option to be turned off in 5.1?
Rumors. Unfounded rumors with zero evidence besides a Reddit post comparing an RMA device. All that proved was RMA worked as intended.
The likelyhood of a hardware revision after 1 month on the market is basically 0%. The same goes for the N5 "revision" after 1 month which was widely reported and 100% proven to be false.
My take from this article is that the Shield Tablet is probably the best value in the tablet market at the moment. I was really shocked to see the battery life go down significantly with Lollipop in your benchmarks, because in my experience battery life has been noticeably better than it was at launch.
I seem to post this on every major mobile review you do, but can you please get it right with regards to 3DMark Physics? It's a pure CPU test (so maybe it should be in the CPU benches) and these custom dual-core efforts, whether it's Denver or Cyclone, always seem to perform poorly.
There is a reason for that, and it's not about core count. Futuremark has even gone into depth in explaining it. In short, there's a particular type of CPU workload test where these architectures *don't* perform well - and it's worth exploring it because it could affect gaming applications.
When I couldn't understand the results I was getting from my iPad Air, I mailed Futuremark for an explanation and I got one. Maybe you could do the same rather than just write off a poor result?
I agree that late is better than never. Rather than discuss things that can't be changed, I felt the following points were worth raising:
Is there any Nexus 6 data in the benchmark charts? I didn't see any. The N6 and N9 were released roughly around the same point in time, and like the N5 and N7 they are high-profile devices in the Android landscape, so it would have been nice to have them in the charts to make comparisons. Please correct me if I've overlooked anything.
The Denver deep dive, while certainly relevant to Nexus 9 and good AT content on any day, was probably a good candidate for having its own article. I believe it is fair to say the Denver content is -less- time sensitive than the overall review. Hopefully the review was not held back by the decision to include the "DDD" content - and to be clear right now I have no reason to believe it was.
Particularly in this kind of full-dress review of high-end devices, could you start covering the delivered sound, the DAC chips and headphone jack?
Via A-B comparisons, I'm finding some real differences and, as people go to more high-quuality audiio streams (plus video sound), this is becoming a differentiator of significance. Thanks.
I know this isn't exactly a Nexus9 questions, but how can your battery life results for iPad Air2 be so inconsistent? We are given 10.18 hrs for "display a white image" and 13.63 hrs for "display video". For an OLED display this is possible, but not for a LED-backlit display unless you are running the video at a "base-level" brightness of much lower than the 200 nits of the "display a white image", and what's the point of that? Surely the relevance of the "display a white image" is to show how long the display+battery lasts under normal usage conditions, not when being used as a flashlight?
My point is --- I am guessing that the "display a white image" test utilizes some app that prevents the screen from going black. Do you have confidence that that app (and in particular whatever tickling of the OS that is done to prevent sleep) is doing this in the energy optimal way, on both iOS and Android?
"The successor to the Nexus 7 was even more incredible, as it pushed hardware that was equal to or better than most tablets on the market at a lower price. However, as with most of these low cost Nexus devices not everything was perfect as corners still had to be cut in order to hit these low price points."
So, hardware that was equal or better, except it wasn't? This is a situation where being more specific would help. My guess, when you said equal or better you were referring to certain specifications, certain obvious specifications like core count, RAM, and maybe screen resolution?
Owned a Nexus 9 for almost 3 months. I purchased three actually to see if backlight bleed was any better, but nope; so I ended up returning them a couple weeks ago. The bleeding was pretty bad; worse than any LCD device i've ever used and definitely worse than the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. And it would've been okay if it had uniform bleeding like the Nexus 5, but it had blotches of bright spots all along the edges which is even more distracting. I found the reflectivity with the screen a non-factor in my exclusively indoor use. It's a shame because the Nexus 9 is an otherwise damn good tablet. What's also disappointing, as the review points out, is if you want a high-end tablet around this size, your only options are the 9 and the Tab S. It seems like a lot of really good Android tablets are in the 8" size, such as the Shield and new Dell Venue, with more manufacturers on the horizon making tablets in this size.
I wonder what level of load penalty is incurred by having to ship in optimized code from main memory. Is there any prefetching going on to preposition code segments in lower level caches ahead of being called?
How does the Tab S fall short of the Nexus 9? I've owned both. Video playback battery life overwhelmingly supports the Tab S, it has a far superior screen (AMOLED...), It has a micro SD slot, it has the ability to connect to HDMI via MHL adapter. The only way the Nexus 9 can output video as it has no available adapter and no onboard MHL support is via 3rd party such as the Chromecast. The 16GB Nexus 9 and 16GB Tab S 8.4 are in the same price range but of course you can expand the memory on the Tab S via a micro SD card. The 32GB Nexus 9 sits in the same price range as the Tab S 10.1 and again the 10.1 can have cheap memory added to it.
The only places the Nexus 9 wins is if you want a 4:3 format (and in that case the first gen IPad Air 64GB is cheaper and a better device) or if you absolutely have to have Lollipop which will eventually get to the Tab S.
In my opinion Tab S will be eventually remembered as a flop. Yes, it has a great wide screen and good battery life for video playback. So it's great for watching videos, which is why I bought one (and would buy it again). Unfortunately, videos is the only thing that Tab S does truly well. The Tab S forums on the web are filled with discussions about "lag" and why Chrome can be so slow. For a flagship tablet, the CPU/GPU performance scores could have been a little better, and the standby as well as web browsing battery life could be A LOT better. The other day I was stuck in a library for hours with this tablet and came to realization that I am not sure if this thing can last for 5 hours of web browsing on a full battery charge, which is horrendous. I have a Samsung laptop with a quad core i7 CPU and 17 inch screen that could work longer on a battery charge.
Basically, this tablet gives you a great screen, SD card slot, good build quality, and not much else. I am still glad I got a 10.5 Tab S on a sale for $400. However, I don't think it's really worth the "regular" price of +500 dollars.
Those NVidia charts obviously show the IPC measured in a 'ratio'. They're not going to tell us what exact IPC they get.
So yeah, the highest it goes is less than 2.0, which means their IPC for optimized code isn't quite double the performance of regular ARM stuff. I'd suppose the regular code could get up to 3 IPC, which means the optimized stuff could get up to 6 IPC (out of the maximum 7). It seems to check out.
I'd have expected you not to throw caution to the wind when reading first-party benchmark slides.
The criticism that there aren't enough apps for the big screen is somewhat misplaced. I suspect that web browsing, videos, ebooks, and productivity apps are the prime applications for the large screen tablets. Why bother with the facebook app, when you can just login into facebook from chrome, and with the biggish screen have access to the full facebook web site?
Chrome alone probably accounts for like 80% of my tablet use (and I've had an Android tablet since the OG TF) seems that's not necessarily the norm tho...
Then why pay for a device with such high end components like the K1 SoC if your just gonna use the browser? Maybe this is what some do because the android marketplace is so limited for large tablet apps but doesn't mean its ok.
I don't fully understand you comment about the SoC? You think web browser is using the hardware somewhat differently from the dedicated apps?
My comment is about the fact that there is not point to have most of the dedicated apps when you have a tablet with a screen the size of a small laptop or netbook. Just fire up the web browser and use whatever web site you need. Most dedicated mobile apps exist because the screen size of a cell phone is pretty small, which can make for an awkward experience even when you pull a mobile web site though a web browser.
It's not entirely true that there isn't much in the tablet space, besides Nexus 9 and Galaxy Tab S. If your pockets are deep enough, you could always get the Apple iPad Air 2. Apple gives you a well balanced tablet with great build quality, fine screen, CPU/GPU performance, and battery life. The only thing that's missing is an SD card slot, but at least there is an option a 64 or 128GB model. Personally, I ended buying a Tab S 10.5 because it was truly difficult to resist it at only $400 sale price, plus $35 for a 64GB SD card. Despite all the disappointing benchmarks, Tab S provides a pretty smooth and fluid android experience with a great screen. Battery life is the only thing that's getting on the way. Five hours of web browsing or standby is pretty disappointing.
Picked one of these up a couple weeks ago and love it. It performs phenomenally well, and looks great. It's a bit heavy for its size and the thin bezel on the sides makes it difficult to hold with one hand without touching the screen, but overall its a fantastic tablet. Highly recommend it.
I'll be honest: I don't understand 80% of what the reviewer wrote. But the 20% that I do understand is enough for me to appreciate the conclusions drawn. I value the informed reviews here much more than those at the 'fan' websites. At Anandtech, people really know what they're talking about, even if I don't.
When I'm able to follow the high-tech insults you guys sling at each other, then I know I've made progress.
Does the Shield Tablet use a similar DCO? I have noticed during it has performance issues during regular use. I wonder if it's this DCO that still needs work.
What is the accuracy of the image labelled "K1-64 Die Shot Mock-up"? Is it a colorized and enhanced version of a real die photograph or is it a pure invention? That 16 * 12 array dominating the picture seems a little off to me: surely there should be structures common to each 16*2 group forming an SMX? Kepler is not a simple tiled sea of cores.
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Mondozai - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
No offence but how relevant is this review so many months after release?You guys dropped the ball on this one. We're also still waiting for the GTX 960 review.
What has happened to Anandtech...
LocutusEstBorg - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
There's no Anand.nathanddrews - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
That's the only change I've noticed.Morawka - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
and no Brian Klugnathanddrews - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Yeah, but that was earlier.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
"What has happened to Anandtech..."Nothing has happened to AnandTech. We're still here and working away at new articles.=)
However this article fell victim to bad timing. The short story is that I was out sick for almost 2 weeks in December, which meant this got backed up into the mess that is the holidays and CES.
As for how relevant it is, it is still Google's premiere large format tablet and the only shipping Denver device, both of which make it a very interesting product.
Jon Tseng - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
It's fine to be late (although maybe not as late as the Razer Blade 2014 review!). Better to have late, differentiated content than early, commoditised content. Whether the review like's the colour of a tablet's trim is of limited interest for me; the details of Denver code-morphing are.Actually my worry is that under new ownership Anandtech might be pushed to go down the publish early/get click views route vs. the publish late/actually deliver something useful. Hopefully it won't come to this, but this is what historically happens... :-(
Operandi - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Being there on day one is not a huge deal but its certainly not ok be as late as this review is or the still MIA 960 review. If you are going to be late you better be brining something new to the table to justify not being there in the same time frame as your peers. This is so laughably late its almost embarrassing to release it at all at this point.Tech journalism like most other markets is competitive and there are lots of other very competent publications out there competing for the same readers. Personally I've already gotten all the Nexus 9 information elsewhere so this review is of no value to me whatsoever. The same goes for the 960 review when/if that review ever shows up.
akdj - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
Not sure where you've seen such an extensive write up and dissection of Denver, but I certainky haven't. Nor were the N9/6 widely available until the holidays were over. Like a month agoFor every 10,000,000 iPads produced, HTC is probably knocking out 10,000
Excellent review, write up and information about the 'other 64bit' option.
Taneli - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Timing is secondary for a deeply technical article like this here. You guys did exactly the right thing, reporting when the device was announced and waited for the review to be done before publishing. Also, having people out sick in a small team is something you really can't do that much about. I hope you're well now.The article itself was superb. Thanks for the read and keep up the good work.
seanleeforever - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
2nd that.I am not here to read about how fast the tablet is or how nice it looks. i am here for in depth content about the chip. would it be nice that this content was available since the release of the product? absolutely, but given the resource it would either be a brief review that is going to be the same as review you can find from hundred of other websites, or late but in depth.
honestly i think anand should be targeting at more tech oriented contents that's few but in depth, and leave the quick/dirty review for other websites.
superb job.
WaitingForNehalem - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Yeah but who cares about tablets??!! I don't come to Anandtech to read about budget tablets, or SFF PCs, or more smartphones. The Denver coverage was not even that in depth TBH, just commentary on the NVidia slides. I have a EE degree and some of the previous write ups were so in depth they could be class material. This one isn't which is fine but I don't think it excuses how late it came out. The enthusiast market is growing and you should be targeting that demographic as you previously have, not catering to the mainstream like hundreds of sites already do.retrospooty - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The enthusiast market is growing ? What with CPU's not really getting, or needing to be any faster for several years now, and a standard mid range quad core i5 (non-overclocked) being WAY more than powerful enough to run 99.9% of anything out there, how is the enthusiast market is growing? Most enthusiasts I know don't even bother any more... There just isnt a need. Any basic PC is great these days.WaitingForNehalem - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I totally agree with you. That doesn't change the fact that the market is growing as more users are adopting gaming PCs. Enthusiasts now actually command a sizable portion of desktops sold. Intel's Devil's Canyon was in response to that.retrospooty - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
OK, I get what you mean.I guess I am still in a mind set where a PC "enthusiast" is your overclocker, tweaker, buying the latest and fastest of everything to eek out that extra few frames per second.
Today, a mid range quad core i5 from 3 years ago and a decent mid-high range card runs any game quite nicely.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
There was a time, readers may be too young to have been there, when there was a Wintel monopoly: M$ needed faster chips to run ever more bloated Windoze and Intel needed a cycle-sink to soak up the increase in cycles that evolving chips provided. Now, we're near (or at?) the limits of single-threaded performance, and still haven't found a way to use multi-processor/core chips in individual applications. There just aren't a) many embarrassingly parallel problems and b) algorithms to turn single-threaded problems into parallel code. I mean, the big deal these days is 4K displays? It looks prettier, to some eyes, but doesn't change the functionality of an application (medical and such excepted, possibly).Does anyone really need an i7 to surf the innterTubes for neater porn?
nico_mach - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
I think the chip coverage was superb, I don't have an EE degree and I'm pretty sure that's what the website is steered towards. And I still think I got it.It's fascinating the number of layers involved in this Android tablet, and speaks to why Apple can optimize so much better. There's the chip->NVIDIA chip optimizer->executable code->Dalvik compiler/runtime->dalvik code. I mean, when the lags are encountered, that's twice as many suspects to investigate.
I still think that the review is a little harsh on Denver. It's hitting the right performance envelope at the right price. While it's an mildly inefficient design, clearly NVIDIA is pricing it accordingly, and that might be a function of moving some of the optimization work to software. And that's work that Apple and MS do all the time - Apple much more successfully, obviously. There's a real gap in knowledge of how efficient Apple's chips are vs how optimized the software/hardware pairing is.
dakishimesan - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I have no interest in tablets, but the deep dive on Denver was a fascinating read, and still completely relevant even if the product is a few months old. Thanks for the great review.Sindarin - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
...can I offer you a cup of hot chicken soup laddy? .....maybe some vicks vapor rub? lol! c'mon dude! we're all sick(vaca) in December!hahmed330 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Hi, outstanding article with incredible attention to detail... Do you think its possible to run Dynamic Code Optimizer on per say 2 or maybe even 4 small cpu cores dedicated to doing all the software OoOE functions instead of using time slicing? (A53s or just some XYZ narrow cores for a potential 2+2 or 4+4 or maybe even 8+8)Also whats the die size of a denver core in comparison to a enhanced cyclone core?? That is where a lot of gains are possible potentially 30%-50%..
hahmed330 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I meant 'running the DCO on small cores instead of using time slicing'...Mr.r9 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Ryan, you should neglect the whiners. I have never seen such negative feedback from people towards a forum/website (well, maybe VB5 forums). Just keep on providing thorough, quality reviews like always.nafhan - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I'm going to vote for good content, late, over crap the day after a devices release. Thanks! :)I don't buy things on day one, anyway.
Hrel - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
It does seem like you guys have more and more articles that "fall victim to bad timing" as time goes on. It really does sound like you need to hire a couple-a few more people. Reviews of the depth you guys do are very time consuming, we all know and appreciate this fact. So you're faced with a decision, allow quality to continue declining or re-invest to bring it back up to it's peak.Cheers!
beastman - Friday, December 25, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review. I just managed to find a 32gb WiFi version for $327. Will upgrade it to Marshmallow when it arrives.tipoo - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Come on now. They've never been the fastest to push reviews out, but are almost always the most in depth. Look at all the detail on Denver here. I find it a better model than pushing out day one vapid reviews, personally.AP27 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Everyone already knew that the N9 fell a little short. The in-depth look into Denver is worth it, though.UtilityMax - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Short of what? For the price, it's a pretty decent value. The only major issue is that there is no SD card slot.akdj - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
The price is a joke. The storage silly and the 'app' selection Reminds me of Detroit.There's other options at 3/499 with REALLY 'decent value'. N9 ain't it
abufrejoval - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Why, is the Nexus 9 no longer available?Actually I'm glad it's late but not as superficial as the other stuff, which was delivered on time, but all had little to say, except that the software didn seem quite ready yet.
philosofa - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Anandtech have always prioritised quality, insight and being correct, over being the first to press. It's why a giant chunk of its readerbase reads it. This is going to be relevant and timely to 90% of people who purchase the Nexus 9. It's also likely to be the definitive article hardware and tech wise produced anywhere in the world.I'd call that a win. I just think there's no pleasing everyone, particularly the 'what happened to AT????!? crowd' that's existed here perpectually. You remind me of the Simcity Newspaper article 'naysayers say nay'. No: Yea.
iJeff - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
You must be new around here. Anandtech was always quite a bit slow to release their mobile hardware reviews; the quality has always been consistently higher in turn.Rezurecta - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
C'mon guys. This isn't the freakin Verge or Engadget review. If you want fancy photos and videos with the technical part saying how much RAM it has, go to those sites.The gift of Anandtech is the deep dive into the technical aspects of the new SoC. That ability is very exclusive and the reason that Anandtech is still the same site.
ayejay_nz - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Release article in a hurry and unfinished ... "What has happened to Anandtech..."Release article 'late' and complete ... "What has happened to Anandtech..."
There are some people you will never be able to please!
Calista - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
You still have plenty of other sites giving 0-day reviews. Let's give the guys (and girls?) of Anandtech the time needed for in-depth reviews.littlebitstrouds - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
No offence but your privilege is showing...HarryX - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
I remember that the Nexus 5 review came out so late and that was by Brian Klug, so it's really nothing unusual here. This review covers so much about Denver that wasn't mentioned elsewhere that I won't mind at all if it was coming late. Reviews like this one (and the Nexus 5 one to a lesser extent, or the Razer Blade 2014 one) are so extensive that I won't mind reading them months after release. The commentary and detailed information in them alone make them worth the read.UtilityMax - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
The review is relevant. The tablet market landscape hasn't been changed much between then and now. Anyone in the market for a Nexus 9 or similar tablet is going to evaluate it against what was available at the time of release.SunnyNW - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Only thing that sucks about these late reviews is if you are trying to base your purchase decision on it especially with holiday season.Aftershocker - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
I've got to agree, Anandtech have dropped the ball on this one. I always prefer to wait and read the comprehensive Anandtech review which I understand can take a few weeks, but this is simply to long to get a review out on a flagship product. Call me sceptical but I can't see such a situation occurring on the review of a new apple product.coburn_c - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
High end my rear end. HTC has made high end tablets, HTC makes high end devices, Google makes high end companies make garbage. Seriously. Google devices are done.rpmrush - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
On the cover page it has a tag in the top right saying, "HTX Nexus #2". Should be HTC?cknobman - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
So regardless of how nice the hardware it Android (and more importantly most of its apps) still have major issues when it comes to tablets.Why waste time buying this stuff when you can get a Windows 8 tablet?
I get the best of both tablet and PC worlds in one device without being held hostage by lord overseer Apple dictating my every move or Androids crappy support and busted app ecosystem.
milkod2001 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
@cknobmanthere's no Windows 8 tablet out there for the same price,with same quality screen and snappiness as this one or Apple tablets. The closest would be Surface3 but it's much more expensive.
If you happen to know about any please post some links please.
rkhighlight - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Because a Windows 8 tablet is worse than a tablet when it comes to tablet user experience and worse than a notebook when it comes to notebook experience. Most people like to have two separate devices rather than owning a product that tries to combine everything. For some people this works but the majority prefers two product.milkod2001 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
not necessarily if done right. Lenovo Yoga comes probably the closest with its hybrid(tablet +notebook). It need to be much cheaper if it wants to be acquired by majority though.melgross - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The Yoga got terrible reviews everywhere. It's hardly recommended.Midwayman - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I don't think that's true at all. Most people would probably prefer to only pay for one device. The issue is one more of execution than concept. If the surface pro 3 were as light, thin, and as good on battery as high end tablets I certainly would have bought one. At a premium even.Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
It that were true MS wouldn't be able to keep Surface on the shelves and the market for x86 Atom hybrids at <$500 would be comprised of more than a handful of OEM & models...I think for a certain class of individuals it makes all the sense in the world; students, business travelers, etc. For most people however it's just a compromise on both form factors and not really much of a money saver (specially when you factor the upgrade cycle into the equation).
steven75 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I have a Windows 8.1 tablet (not RT). It's the worst tablet interface I've used yet. A total bomb. And the touch apps and selection are universally awful.If it didn't have "classic" Windows desktop, I'd have sent it back to the store.
rpmrush - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I find the 4:3 aspect ratio a turn off. Why change now. There are zero apps natively designed for this in the Android ecosystem. Why would a developer make a change for one device? It just seems like more fragmentation for no reason. I'm picking up a Shield Tab soon.kenansadhu - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
One example to drive my point: I bought kingdom rush and found out that on my widescreen tablet, the game won't fit the screen properly. If any, this will fit apps previously designed for ipads well. Hate to admit it, but apple has such a huge lead in the tablet market it's just reasonable for developers to focus on them first.melgross - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Well, there are almost no tablet apps at all for Android. One reason is because of the aspect ratio being the same for phones and tablets. Why bother writing g a tablet app when the phone app can stretch to fit the screen exactly? Yes, they're a waste of time, but hey, it doesn't cost developers anything either.Maybe goi g to the much more useful 4:3 ratio for tablets will force new, real tablet apps.
It's one reason why there are so many real iPad apps out there.
retrospooty - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
You sound like you are stuck in 2012. Update your arguments ...UtilityMax - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
There will be more tablets coming with 4:3 screen. Samsung's next flagship tablet will be 4:3. As much as I like watching movies on a wide screen, I think it's not the killer tablet application for most users, and most people will benefit from having a more balanced 4:3 screen. It works better for web browsing, ebooks, and productivity apps.Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Most simpler apps just scale fine one way or the other... I think 4:3 makes a ton of sense for larger tablets, it remains almost exactly as tall in landscape mode (which a lot of people seem to favor, and I find bizarre) and more manageable in portrait since it's shorter.7-8" & 16:9 is still my personal preference, since I mostly use it for reading in portrait. Try to think outside of your personal bubble tho... I bought the Nexus 9 for my mother who prefers a larger tablet, never watches movies on it, yet almost always uses it in landscape.
It'll be perfect for her, shoot, it even matches the aspect ratio of her mirrorless camera so photos can be viewed full screen, bonus.
UtilityMax - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
I personally think about the reverse. Big tablets with 9-11 screens are often bought for media consumption. Because of that, it makes sense for them to come with a wide screen. For me, having wide screen for watching movies on the flights and in the gym was one of the prime reasons to buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5, even though its benchmarks look only so so.However, a 9 to 11 inch tablet is too bulky to hold in one hand and type with another. It almost begs for a stand. So for casual use, like casual web browsing or ebook reading, a smaller tablet with a 4:3 screen works better. And so I went ahead and got a tablet with 4:3 screen for that purpose.
Impulses - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Valid points, obviously usage cases can differ a lot, that's the nice thing about Android tho... It doesn't have to conform to any one aspect ratio that won't fit everyone's taste.LordConrad - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I love the 4:3 aspect ratio. I primarily use tablets in Portrait Mode, and have always disliked the "tall and thin" Portrait Mode of traditional android tablets. This is the main area where Google has always fallen behind Apple, IMHO. This is the main reason I gave my Nexus 7 (2013) to my nephew and bought a Nexus 9, and I have no regrets.R. Hunt - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Agreed. I understand that YMMV and all that, but to me, large widescreen tablets are simply unusable in portrait. I'd love to have the choice of a 3:2 Android tablet though.mkygod - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
I think so to. The 3:2 ratio is one of the things that Microsoft has gotten right with their Surface Pro devices. It's the perfect compromise IMOUtilityMax - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
I am a little perplexed by this comment. A typical user will be on the web 90% of time. Not only the web browser does not need to be natively designed or optimized for any screen ratio, but it also will be more usable on a 4:3 screen. So will the productivity apps. The only disappointment for me on the 4:3 screen would be with watching the widescreen videos or TV shows. Moreover, there is quite a bit of evidence than a lot of the next generation tablets will be 4:3. Samsung's next flagship tablet supposedly will be 4:3.gtrenchev - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Anandtech is becoming more and more boring last year. Sparse on reviews, short on tech comments, lacking on depth and enthusiasm. I can see Anandtech has become a just job for you guys, not the passion it was for Anand :-) And yes, his absence is definitely noticeable.George
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Was the Denver deep-dive not sufficient enough? Always welcome for comments.As for timing, see Ryan's comment above.
We've actually had a very good quarter content wise, with a full review on the front page at least four out of every five weekdays if not every weekday.
milkod2001 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Why not to post on your forum some sort of suggestion box/poll where all could say what should get reviewed first so some folks won't cry where is the review of their favorite toy :) ?Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Because they'll still cry regardless, and they can't possibly work entirely based on readers' whim, doesn't make sense logistically or nor editorially... Readers might vote on five things ahead of the rest which all fall on the same writer's lap, they won't all get reviewed before the rest, or readers might not be privy to new hardware because of NDAs or cases where Anandtech can't source something for review.tuxRoller - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
While I enjoyed the review, I would've loved to have seen the kind of code driven analysis that was done with Swift.In particular, how long does it take for dco to kick in. What is the IPC for code that NEVER gets optimized, and conversely, what is the IPC for embarrassingly instruction-wise parallel code? Since it's relying on ram to store the uops, how long does the code need to run before it breaks even with the arm decoder? Etc.
victorson - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Are you guys kidding? Better late than never, but heck.. this is freaking late.abufrejoval - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Thanks for making it worth the wait!The in-depth analysis of Denver is uniquely Anandtech, because you can't get that anywhere else.
And while Charly D. is very entertaining, the paywall is a bit of an impediment and I quite like again the Anand touch of trying to be as fair as possible.
I was and remain a bit worried that there seems to be no other platform for Denver, which typically signals a deeper flaw with an SoC in the tablet and phone space.
While I'm somewhat less worried now, that Denver might be acceptable as a SoC, the current Nexus generation is no longer attractive at these prices, even less with the way the €/$ is evolving.
Taneli - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
eDRAM cache à la Crystalwell would be interesting in a future Denver chip.PC Perv - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
It is clear, even though you did not say, why no one other than NV and Google will use Denver in their products. Thank you for the coherent review, Ryan.P.S. I can't wait for the day SunSpider, Basemark, and WebXPRT disappear from your benchmark suit.
jjj - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
You always make those kind of claims about dual core vs more cores but you have never attempted to back them up with real world perf and power testing.In real use there are alerts and chats and maybe music playing and so on. While your hypothesis could be valid or partially valid you absolutely need to first verify it before heavily insisting on it and accepting it as true. Subjective conclusions are just not your style is it, you test things to get to objective results.
And it wold be easy you already have "clean"numbers and you would just need to run the same benchmarks for perf and power with some simulated background activity to be able to compare the differences in gains/loses.
PC Perv - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Where would you put the performance of "backup" ARM-only part of Denver? Cortex-A7? Is it measurable at all?Also, why don't Samsung use F2FS for their devices? I thought it was developed by them.
abufrejoval - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
While the principal designer seems to be a Korean, I'm not sure he works for Samsung, who typically used Yet Another Flash File System (YAFFS).Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
It's not measurable in a traditional sense, as the DCO will kick in at some point. However I'd say it's somewhere along the lines of A53, though overall a bit better.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The design philosophy of the DCO does make a lot of sense. When your mobile device starts to bog down and you start cursing at it, what is it usually doing? It is usually looping or iterating through something. The DCO wont help with small blocks of code that execute in 500uS, but you dont need help with that sort of code anyway. What you want to improve is exactly the type of code the DCO can improve: the kind of code that takes several dozen milliseconds (or more) to execute. That is when you begin to notice the lag in your cpu.mpokwsths - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Joshua & Ryan,please update the charts with the bench results of the newer version of Androbench 4: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com....
(I had previously commented on the fact that you can't safely compare the i/o results of different OS AND different bench apps).
Androbench 4 is redesigned it to use multiple i/o threads (as a proper i/o bench app should have) and produces vastly improved results on both Lollipop and earlier Android devices.
You will not be able to compare the newer results with older ones, but at least it will put an end to this ridiculus ι/ο performance difference between iOS and Android, the one you persistently -but falsly- keep projecting.
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I tested this out on several of my devices and could see only minor improvements, all within 10%. The performance difference to iOS devices does not seem to be a dupe at all.mpokwsths - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
My results strongly disagree with you:Nexus 5: Seq Write: 19MB/s --> 55 MB/s
Rand Write: 0.9 --> 2.9 MB/s
Sony Z3 Tablet: Seq Write: 21 MB/s --> 53 MB/s
Rand Write: 1,6 MB/s --> 8MB/s
Seq Read: 135 MB/s --> 200MB/s
I can upload pics showing my findings.
mpokwsths - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Meet the fastest Nexus 5 in the world:https://www.dropbox.com/s/zkhn073xy8l28ry/Screensh...;)
lucam - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Next time you will write the article for Anand.tuxRoller - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Just tested on my N7 2013. Results were far higher than shown in the chart.SR:64.2->76.1
SW:18.4->30.1
RR:11.2->13.4
RW:0.7->3.1
mpokwsths - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Well, your results are far far more improved than 10% Andrei says.3 devices by 2 different users, all showed vast improvements (10-500%).
Only they refuse to acknowledge it.
Who knows, it seems Anandtech guys are on Apple's payroll...
eiriklf - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Just wanted to note that on the NAND performance front, I believe the android devices which beat the nexus 9 in sequential speed use emmc 5.0 while the nexus uses a high quality emmc 4.5. I think this is because the tegra K1 SoC does not support emmc 5.0.tviceman - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Better late than never, although being this late is indeed a big letdown.Onto the hardware, looks like Denver is an interesting first custom SoC from Nvidia. Solid in some respects, lacking in others. I think it's a solid building block from which to work on and improve. I hope Nvidia continues the custom ARM core path and gets more design wins (if warranted) moving forward.
kepstin - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The Denver chip design is pretty interesting, but it reminds me very strongly of another mobile-targeted chip that didn't do well in the marketplace; the Transmeta Crusoe.Both are VLIW designs with in-order execution, both rely on software code translation that runs on the CPU itself. Both even used a partitioned section of system ram as a translated ops cache.
The most significant difference that I see between them is the addition of a native ARM decoder to the Denver CPU; the Crusoe didn't have a native X86 decoder and relied on the dynamic translation for all code that it executed.
I had a Crusoe for a while in a Sony Vaio; it was used in some of the very small/lightweight ultraportable laptops by Japanese manufacturers for a while.
phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Didn't a large group of Transmeta devs get hired by Nvidia?ABR - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Crusoe lost because Transmeta woke the sleeping giant Intel to the value of low-power, and then a group of 100 people couldn't keep up the resulting engineering race. The x86 world would be a pretty different place today if that hadn't occurred. But I'd say the jury is still out on the overall capability of the VLIW + morphing approach.frenchy_2001 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I would second that. A quick search returned a licensing agreement where nvidia licensed Transmeta's technology.This could be a good part of Denver.
About in order execution, the biggest experiment was from intel: itanium.
kgh00007 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
It's 3 months late, the nexus 9 was released on the 3rd of November!!No excuses, but it's just too late to help people make an informed decision!! Just like dog years, one year for a tablet is like 7 technology(dog) years!!
melgross - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
So, people only buy devices during the first three months?Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Apparently... Although getting the review in before February would've shut all these people up, cheapest place to get the Nexus 9 all thru the holidays was Amazon ($350 for 16GB) and they gave you until January 31 to return it regardless of when you bought it.Only reason I'm so keenly aware is I bought one as a February birthday gift, opened it last weekend just to check it was fine before the return window closed... Not much backlight bleed at all even tho it was manufacturerd in October (bought in late December), some back flex but it's going in a case anyway.
blzd - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
What does the month of manufacture have to do with the back light bleed? You don't actually believe those "revision" rumors, do you?If you do, consider how practical it is for a hardware revision to come out 1 month after release. Then consider how one set of pictures on a Reddit post proves anything other than that their RMA worked as intended.
ToTTenTranz - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I wish more smartphone/tablet makers put as much thought into their external speakers as HTC does.Once having a HTC One M7, I simply can't go back to mono speakers at the back of devices.
Dribble - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Glad the review is here at last, next one a little bit quicker please :)UpSpin - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I have following issues with your review:1. You run webbrowser tests and derive CPU performance from it. That's nonsense! It's a web-browser test, and it won't be a CPU test whatever you do. If you want to test raw CPU performance you have to run native CPU test applications.
2. Your battery life analysis is based on false assumptions and you derive doubtful claims from it.
The error is quite evident on the iPad Air test. In your newly introduced white display test, with airplane on, CPU/GPU idling, etc. the iPad Air 2 has a battery life of 10:18 hours. Now in your web-browsing battery test with WiFi on and the CPU busy, the iPad Air 2 has a battery life of 9:76 hours. That's a difference of 4%. The Nexus 9 has a difference of 30%, the Note 4 15%, the Shield Tablet 25%.
You conclude: The Tegra K1 is inefficient. But I could also conclude that the A8 is inefficient and the Tegra K1 very efficient. The Tegra K1 needs significantly less power while idling, compared to the A8, which consumes always the same, mostly independent on the load. So finally, the A8 lacks any kind of power saving mode.
That's abstruse, but the consequence of your test. Or maybe your test is flawed from the beginning on.
3. " I suspect we’re looking at the direct result of the large battery, combined with an efficient display as the Nexus 9 can last as long as 15 hours in this test compared to the iPad Air 2’s 10 hours."
Sorry, but I don't get this either. The Nexus 9 has a 25.46 WHr battery, the iPad Air 2 a 27.3 WHr battery (+7%). The Nexus 9 has a 8.9" Display, the iPad Air 2 a 9.7". (+19% area). The resolution is the same, thus the DPI on the Nexus 9 higher. The display techonoly is the same, as you said in your analysis. So the difference must be related to something else, like a highly efficient idle SoC in the Nexus 9.
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The battery life tests analysis is based on true facts on the technical workings of the SoC and its idle power states and we are confident in the resulting conclusions.JarredWalton - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Going along with what Andrei said, an SoC isn't "efficient" if it's doing no work -- the A8 may not have idle power as low as the K1-64, but when you're actually doing anything more with the tablet in question is when efficiency matters. It's clear that the Air 2 wins out over the Nexus 9 in some of those tests (GFX in particular). Doing more (or equivalent) work while using less power is efficient.Imagine this as an example of why idle power only matters so far: if you were to start comparing cars on how long they could idle instead of actual gas mileage, would anyone care? "Car XYZ can run for 20 hours off a tank while idle while Car ZYX only lasts 15 hours!" Except, neither car is actually doing what a car is suppose to do, which is take you from point A to point B.
The white screen test is merely a way to look at the idle power draw for a device, and by that we can get an idea of how much additional power is needed when the device is actually in use. Also note that it's possible due to the difference in OS that Android simply better disables certain services in the test scenario and iOS might be wasting power -- the fact that the battery life hardly changes in our Internet WiFi test even suggests that's the case.
To that end, the battery life of the N9 is still quite good. Get rid of the smartphones in the charts and it's actually pretty much class leading. But it's still odd that the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet and iPad Air 2 only show a small drop between idle and Internet, while N9 loses 33% of its battery life.
ABR - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Idle power is pretty important for real world use for tablets, for example where you are reading something and the system is just sitting there. Those "load web page then pause for xx time" test would probably be really good for measuring.JarredWalton - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
That's exactly what our Internet test does, which is why the 33% drop in battery life is so alarming. What exactly is going on that N9 loading a generally not too complex web page every 15 seconds or so kills battery life?ABR - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I don't know if it would change this conclusion, but load-every-15-seconds is still only testing "screenager" behavior. For example while I'm reading this comments page it's a lot longer than 15 seconds. More like 30 seconds, scroll, 30 seconds, scroll, 5-10 minutes load another. Reading e-books is another low-intensity usage. Not saying that gaming and other continuous usage patterns aren't out there, but a lot of what people say they use tablets for is lower intensity.lucam - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Upspin, send your resume to Anand and write next time your article. Looking fwd to reading your pearl of wisdom...Affectionate-Bed-980 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
You guys really need to stop using that gray/black surface for the background to show off your black devices. It really makes it hard to see the details.gijames1225 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
It's a shame that NVidia couldn't get Denver out on a smaller process at launch. They're giving the A8 a run for it's money, but the 28nm process is killer at this point.WereCatf - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
"it seems to be clear that an all-metal unibody design would’ve greatly improved the design of the Nexus 9 and justified its positioning better."I don't quite agree. This article mentions several times the author's wish for full-body aluminum design, but as someone who already has a tablet with a nearly full aluminum body I do have to point out that it tends to be quite slippery in one's hands; you need a much tighter grip just to hold it without it slipping and this makes it tiring to hold in the long run. A tablet with a sort of rubbery, non-slip back won't look as pretty, but it will certainly be much more comfortable and I definitely would choose practicality over looks.
danbob999 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Also metal blocks wireless signal. Asus Transformer Prime has abysmal wifi and GPS reception because of that.There is no rational advantage to metal cases. Only looks, which is debatable.
WereCatf - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Aye, my tablet had that issue. Luckily it's easy to open up and replace the antenna with a stronger one, something that helps, but not all tablets are that easy to open or have a replaceable antenna.Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Metal would also make it heavier... Plastic doesn't have to mean back flex, it's just a design/QC issue they didn't address. My OG TF had a textured plastic back that was pretty solid, several years ago. It still creaked a little but it was mostly because of the mating of the back to the metal frame, no flex tho.olivaw - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I wonder if nVidia is "crazy enough" to develop a runtime that would JIT from android bytecode directly to denver. As it is, there are two layers of compilation going on, if ART could by swapped by an nVidia runtime things could get really interesting!joe0185 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The browser tests are pretty worthless as it is but they are made even more worthless by the omission of version information. If AnandTech is going to include Javascript benchmarks they should at least include the browser version. What version of Chrome are you running on each device? There have been pretty dramatic improvements in Chrome on Android over the past year.cjs150 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
No microSD - no chance of me buying it.Tablets are designed to be portable so why do designers never consider the needs of people on the move who may not have access to the cloud (either at all or at prohibitive cost). With 128 mb MicroSD card I can store tons of music, movies, tv shows and watch when I like on holiday
Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
USB OTG ftwR. Hunt - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Hardly the same thing though.UtilityMax - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
They want you to pay royalties to store your stuff in the cloud. I agree that 16GB is somewhat limiting. Half of that space will be used by the OS and applications, with barely anything left for user's data. I'd go with the 32GB model at the very least.NotLupus - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
What's the date today?smayonak - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Ryan, I noticed that the Nexus 9 offers always-on (screen-off) Google Now activation. I checked in CPUSpy (and other apps) and noticed that even when all cores are parked, this feature works, suggesting that NVidia may have included a custom DSP or third core for audio processing. The +1 core in NVidia's Tegra platform was apparently transparent to the operating system, because it never showed up in CPU activity monitor apps.If it is a custom DSP used for natural language processing, this would probably run afoul of Qualcomm's lock on the IP. Which might explain why NVidia never announced a third core (or DSP) in the Denver platform.
I'm not sure if it's just my imagination at work -- can you confirm or disprove (or speculate) on the existence of a third core? Supposedly Android 5.0 includes support for idle-state audio processing, but only if supported by the hardware. But it would seem hardware support would require some kind of low-energy state processing core. And nothing of the sort appears in NVidia's press releases.
By the way, thank you for the amazingly detailed and insightful review. You guys are amazing.
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Always-on voice activation is done by the audio SoC and has no connection to the main SoC or any DSP. Qualcomm's voice activation is done via the audio chip.smayonak - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Thanks. I have no doubt that's true, but I can't track down a reference. Anandtech's own article on the subject refers to Motorola's implementation of idle-state audio processing as relying on the X8's low-power cores, dedicated to handling audio processing.Motorola's press release claimed that their X8 included proprietary "natural language" and "contextual" processing cores (which I thought were some kind of analog-to-digital audio-processing DSP, but may be wrong), which allowed for always-on activation of Google Now.
I can count the number of devices that support screen-off Google Now on one hand. The relatively small number of devices with this feature is perplexing. Or maybe no one advertises it?
toyotabedzrock - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
While turning a GPU into a CPU is a great accomplishment then essentially built a CPU that seems designed to benchmark well but will stall endlessly on real world code.Anonymous Blowhard - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
This article is soooo late, clearly you should have just thrown up a half-page blurb with a clickbait title and was shallow enough that it could have just been written hands-off from the tech specs./s
Great read as always. Good things are worth waiting for.
dtgoodwin - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I really appreciate the depth that this article has, however, I wonder if it would have been better to separate the in depth CPU analysis for a separate article. I will probably never remember to come back to the Nexus 9 review if I want to remember a specific detail about that CPU.nevertell - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Has nVidia exposed that they would provide a static version of the DCO so that app developers would be able to optimize their binaries at compile time ? Or do these optimizations rely on the program state when they are being executed ? From a pure academic point of view, it would be interesting to see the overhead introduced by the DCO when comparing previously optimized code without the DCO running and running the SoC as was intended.Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Nice in depth review as always, came a little late for me (I purchased one to gift it, which I ironically haven't done since the birthday is this month) but didn't really change much as far as my decision so it's all good...I think the last remark nails it, had the price point being just a little lower most of the minor QC issues wouldn't have been blown up...
I don't know if $300 for 16GB was feasible (pretty much the price point of the smaller Shield), but $350 certainly was and Amazon was selling it for that much all thru Nov-Dec which is bizarre since Google never discounted it themselves.
I think they should've just done a single $350-400 32GB SKU, saved themselves a lot of trouble and people would've applauded the move (and probably whined for a 64GB but you can't please everyone). Or a combo deal with the keyboard, which HTC was selling at 50% at one point anyway.
Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
No keyboard review btw?JoshHo - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
We did not receive the keyboard folio for review.treecats - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Where is the comparison to NEXUS 10????Maybe because Nexus 10's battery life is crap after 1 year of use!!!
Please come back review it again when you used it for a year.
treecats - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
My previously holds true for all the Nexus device line I own.I had Nexus 4,
currently have Nexus 5, and Nexus 10. All the Nexus devices I own have bad battery life after 1 year of use.
Google, fix the battery problem.
blzd - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
That tells me you are mistreating your batteries. You think it's coincidence that it's happening to all your devices? Do you know how easy it is for batteries to degrade when over heating? Do you know every battery is rated for a certain number of charges only?Mostly you want to avoid heat, especially while charging. Gaming while charging? That's killing the battery. GPS navigation while charging? Again, degrading the battery.
Each time you discharge and charge the battery you are using one of it's charge cycles. So if you use the device a lot and charge it multiple times a day you will notice degradation after a year. This is not unique to Google devices.
grave00 - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
I don't think you have the latest info on how battery charging vs battery life works.hstewartanand - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Even though I personal have 6 tablets ( 2 iPads, 2 Windows 8.1 and 2 android ) and as developer I find them technically inferior to Actual PC - except for Windows 8.1 Surface Pro.I recently purchase an Lenovo y50 with i7 4700 - because I desired AVX 2 video processing. To me ARM based platforms will never replace PC devices for certain applications - like Video processing and 3d graphics work.
I am big fan of Nvidia GPU's but don't care much for ARM cpus - I do like the completion that it given to Intel to produce low power CPU's for this market
What I really like to see is a true technical bench mark that compare the true power of cpus from ARM and Intel and rank them. This includes using extended instructions like AVX 2 on Intel cpus.
Compared this with equivalent configured Nvidia GPU on Intel CPU - and I would say ARM has a very long way to go.
But a lot depends on what you doing with the device. I am currently typing this on a 4+ year old Macbook Air - because it easy to do it and convenient. My other Windows 8.1 ( Lenovo 2 Mix 8 - Intel Adam Baytrail ) has roughly the same speed - but Macbook AIR is more convenient. My primary tablet is the Apple Mini with Retina screen, it is also convent for email and amazon and small stuff.
The problem with some of bench marks - is that they maybe optimized for one platform more than another and dependent on OS components which may very between OS environments. So ideal the tests need to native compile for cpu / gpu combination and take advantage of hardware. I don't believe such a benchmark exists. Probably the best way to do this get developers interested in platforms to come up with contest for best score and have code open source - so no cheating. It would be interesting to see ranking of machines from tablets, phones, laptop and even high performance xeon machines. I also have an 8+ Year old dual Xeon 5160 Nvidia GTX 640 (best I can get on this old machine ) and I would bet it will blow away any of this ARM based tablets. Performance wise it a little less but close to my Lenovo y50 - if not doing VIDEO processing because of AVX 2 is such significant improvement.
In summary it really hard to compare performance of ARM vs Intel machines. But this review had some technical information that brought me back to my older days when writing assembly code on OS - PC-MOS/386
MonkeyPaw - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Maybe I missed it, but can you comment on browser performance in terms of tabs staying in memory? I had a Note 10.1 2014 for a brief time, and I found that tabs had to reload/refresh constantly, despite the 3GB of RAM. Has this gotten any better with the Nexus and Lollipop? Through research, I got the impression it was a design choice in Chrome, but I wondered if you could figure out any better. Say what you want about Windows RT, but my old Surface 2 did a good job of holding more tabs in RAM on IE.blzd - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Lollipop has memory management issues right now, as was mentioned in this very article. Apps are cleared from memory frequently after certain amount of up time and reboots are required.mukiex - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Hey Josh,Awesome review. As I'm sure others have noted, the Denver part alone was awesome to read about! =D
gixxer - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
There have been reports of a hardware refresh to address the buttons, light bleed, and flexing of the back cover. There was no mention of this in this article. What was the build date on the model that was used for this review? Is there any truth to the hardware refresh?Also, Lollipop is supposed to be getting a big update to 5.1 very soon. Will this article be updated with the new Lollipop build results? Will FDE have the option to be turned off in 5.1?
blzd - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Rumors. Unfounded rumors with zero evidence besides a Reddit post comparing an RMA device. All that proved was RMA worked as intended.The likelyhood of a hardware revision after 1 month on the market is basically 0%. The same goes for the N5 "revision" after 1 month which was widely reported and 100% proven to be false.
konondrum - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
My take from this article is that the Shield Tablet is probably the best value in the tablet market at the moment. I was really shocked to see the battery life go down significantly with Lollipop in your benchmarks, because in my experience battery life has been noticeably better than it was at launch.OrphanageExplosion - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I seem to post this on every major mobile review you do, but can you please get it right with regards to 3DMark Physics? It's a pure CPU test (so maybe it should be in the CPU benches) and these custom dual-core efforts, whether it's Denver or Cyclone, always seem to perform poorly.There is a reason for that, and it's not about core count. Futuremark has even gone into depth in explaining it. In short, there's a particular type of CPU workload test where these architectures *don't* perform well - and it's worth exploring it because it could affect gaming applications.
http://www.futuremark.com/pressreleases/understand...
When I couldn't understand the results I was getting from my iPad Air, I mailed Futuremark for an explanation and I got one. Maybe you could do the same rather than just write off a poor result?
hlovatt - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Really liked the Denver deep dive and we got a bonus in-depth tablet review. Thanks for a great article.behrangsa - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Wow! Even iPad 4 is faster than K1? I remember nVidia displaying some benchmarks putting Tegra K1 far ahead of Apple's A8X.behrangsa - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Anyway to edit comments? Looks like the K1 benchmark was against the predecessor to A8X, the A7.AbRASiON - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
LCD, not OLED? Blacks being grey? Nope :/blzd - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
I'd actually rather grey blacks then the loss of detail in black areas. Pure black is nice, but not when it comes at the expense of shadow details.techn0mage - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I agree that late is better than never. Rather than discuss things that can't be changed, I felt the following points were worth raising:Is there any Nexus 6 data in the benchmark charts? I didn't see any. The N6 and N9 were released roughly around the same point in time, and like the N5 and N7 they are high-profile devices in the Android landscape, so it would have been nice to have them in the charts to make comparisons. Please correct me if I've overlooked anything.
The Denver deep dive, while certainly relevant to Nexus 9 and good AT content on any day, was probably a good candidate for having its own article. I believe it is fair to say the Denver content is -less- time sensitive than the overall review. Hopefully the review was not held back by the decision to include the "DDD" content - and to be clear right now I have no reason to believe it was.
WndlB - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Particularly in this kind of full-dress review of high-end devices, could you start covering the delivered sound, the DAC chips and headphone jack?Via A-B comparisons, I'm finding some real differences and, as people go to more high-quuality audiio streams (plus video sound), this is becoming a differentiator of significance. Thanks.
JoshHo - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link
We could do subjective opinion, but properly testing 3.5mm output requires significant investment in test equipment.name99 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I know this isn't exactly a Nexus9 questions, but how can your battery life results for iPad Air2 be so inconsistent?We are given 10.18 hrs for "display a white image" and 13.63 hrs for "display video". For an OLED display this is possible, but not for a LED-backlit display unless you are running the video at a "base-level" brightness of much lower than the 200 nits of the "display a white image", and what's the point of that? Surely the relevance of the "display a white image" is to show how long the display+battery lasts under normal usage conditions, not when being used as a flashlight?
My point is --- I am guessing that the "display a white image" test utilizes some app that prevents the screen from going black. Do you have confidence that that app (and in particular whatever tickling of the OS that is done to prevent sleep) is doing this in the energy optimal way, on both iOS and Android?
JoshHo - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link
I don't believe there was any real background CPU usage. To my knowledge the difference is that Apple enables dynamic contrast in movies.easp - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
"The successor to the Nexus 7 was even more incredible, as it pushed hardware that was equal to or better than most tablets on the market at a lower price. However, as with most of these low cost Nexus devices not everything was perfect as corners still had to be cut in order to hit these low price points."So, hardware that was equal or better, except it wasn't? This is a situation where being more specific would help. My guess, when you said equal or better you were referring to certain specifications, certain obvious specifications like core count, RAM, and maybe screen resolution?
mkygod - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Owned a Nexus 9 for almost 3 months. I purchased three actually to see if backlight bleed was any better, but nope; so I ended up returning them a couple weeks ago. The bleeding was pretty bad; worse than any LCD device i've ever used and definitely worse than the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. And it would've been okay if it had uniform bleeding like the Nexus 5, but it had blotches of bright spots all along the edges which is even more distracting. I found the reflectivity with the screen a non-factor in my exclusively indoor use. It's a shame because the Nexus 9 is an otherwise damn good tablet. What's also disappointing, as the review points out, is if you want a high-end tablet around this size, your only options are the 9 and the Tab S. It seems like a lot of really good Android tablets are in the 8" size, such as the Shield and new Dell Venue, with more manufacturers on the horizon making tablets in this size.MartinT - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
I wonder what level of load penalty is incurred by having to ship in optimized code from main memory. Is there any prefetching going on to preposition code segments in lower level caches ahead of being called?techcrazy - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Best Nexus 9 review i read. Excellent work anandtech team.RobilarOCN - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
How does the Tab S fall short of the Nexus 9? I've owned both. Video playback battery life overwhelmingly supports the Tab S, it has a far superior screen (AMOLED...), It has a micro SD slot, it has the ability to connect to HDMI via MHL adapter. The only way the Nexus 9 can output video as it has no available adapter and no onboard MHL support is via 3rd party such as the Chromecast. The 16GB Nexus 9 and 16GB Tab S 8.4 are in the same price range but of course you can expand the memory on the Tab S via a micro SD card. The 32GB Nexus 9 sits in the same price range as the Tab S 10.1 and again the 10.1 can have cheap memory added to it.The only places the Nexus 9 wins is if you want a 4:3 format (and in that case the first gen IPad Air 64GB is cheaper and a better device) or if you absolutely have to have Lollipop which will eventually get to the Tab S.
UtilityMax - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
In my opinion Tab S will be eventually remembered as a flop. Yes, it has a great wide screen and good battery life for video playback. So it's great for watching videos, which is why I bought one (and would buy it again). Unfortunately, videos is the only thing that Tab S does truly well. The Tab S forums on the web are filled with discussions about "lag" and why Chrome can be so slow. For a flagship tablet, the CPU/GPU performance scores could have been a little better, and the standby as well as web browsing battery life could be A LOT better. The other day I was stuck in a library for hours with this tablet and came to realization that I am not sure if this thing can last for 5 hours of web browsing on a full battery charge, which is horrendous. I have a Samsung laptop with a quad core i7 CPU and 17 inch screen that could work longer on a battery charge.Basically, this tablet gives you a great screen, SD card slot, good build quality, and not much else. I am still glad I got a 10.5 Tab S on a sale for $400. However, I don't think it's really worth the "regular" price of +500 dollars.
Impulses - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
5 hours? Yikes... My Atom netbook from half a decade ago could manage that...UtilityMax - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
But amazingly, the Tab S 10.5 can play a 720p video for something like 10 hours on a full charge. Go figure.mkozakewich - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Those NVidia charts obviously show the IPC measured in a 'ratio'. They're not going to tell us what exact IPC they get.So yeah, the highest it goes is less than 2.0, which means their IPC for optimized code isn't quite double the performance of regular ARM stuff. I'd suppose the regular code could get up to 3 IPC, which means the optimized stuff could get up to 6 IPC (out of the maximum 7). It seems to check out.
I'd have expected you not to throw caution to the wind when reading first-party benchmark slides.
flamingspartan3 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
The Nexus 7 2013 is still competitive in many of these benchmarks. It's remarkable how great the device is even after almost two years.UtilityMax - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
The criticism that there aren't enough apps for the big screen is somewhat misplaced. I suspect that web browsing, videos, ebooks, and productivity apps are the prime applications for the large screen tablets. Why bother with the facebook app, when you can just login into facebook from chrome, and with the biggish screen have access to the full facebook web site?Impulses - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Chrome alone probably accounts for like 80% of my tablet use (and I've had an Android tablet since the OG TF) seems that's not necessarily the norm tho...Jumangi - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Then why pay for a device with such high end components like the K1 SoC if your just gonna use the browser? Maybe this is what some do because the android marketplace is so limited for large tablet apps but doesn't mean its ok.UtilityMax - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
I don't fully understand you comment about the SoC? You think web browser is using the hardware somewhat differently from the dedicated apps?My comment is about the fact that there is not point to have most of the dedicated apps when you have a tablet with a screen the size of a small laptop or netbook. Just fire up the web browser and use whatever web site you need. Most dedicated mobile apps exist because the screen size of a cell phone is pretty small, which can make for an awkward experience even when you pull a mobile web site though a web browser.
UtilityMax - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
It's not entirely true that there isn't much in the tablet space, besides Nexus 9 and Galaxy Tab S. If your pockets are deep enough, you could always get the Apple iPad Air 2. Apple gives you a well balanced tablet with great build quality, fine screen, CPU/GPU performance, and battery life. The only thing that's missing is an SD card slot, but at least there is an option a 64 or 128GB model. Personally, I ended buying a Tab S 10.5 because it was truly difficult to resist it at only $400 sale price, plus $35 for a 64GB SD card. Despite all the disappointing benchmarks, Tab S provides a pretty smooth and fluid android experience with a great screen. Battery life is the only thing that's getting on the way. Five hours of web browsing or standby is pretty disappointing.wintermute000 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Sony Xperia Tablet Z2. SoC is one gen behind but if you can get it for a good price, you're laughing. Fantastic build, clean stock software, lag free.sunil5228 - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Brilliant ! Esp loved the segway into the Denver CPU and dual vs quad arcitechture comparisons,very eye opening. thankyou sirbdiddytampa - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
Picked one of these up a couple weeks ago and love it. It performs phenomenally well, and looks great. It's a bit heavy for its size and the thin bezel on the sides makes it difficult to hold with one hand without touching the screen, but overall its a fantastic tablet. Highly recommend it.Ozo - Monday, February 16, 2015 - link
Thanks for the lucid explanation of Denver.Any insight into why Google/HTC dropped the ball on "wireless" Qi charging? Especially when it was finally added to the Nexus phone!?!
I was set to upgrade from my Nexus 7 (2013), but no Qi = no sale. :(
Fardreit - Monday, February 23, 2015 - link
I'll be honest: I don't understand 80% of what the reviewer wrote. But the 20% that I do understand is enough for me to appreciate the conclusions drawn. I value the informed reviews here much more than those at the 'fan' websites. At Anandtech, people really know what they're talking about, even if I don't.When I'm able to follow the high-tech insults you guys sling at each other, then I know I've made progress.
flashbacck - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Does the Shield Tablet use a similar DCO? I have noticed during it has performance issues during regular use. I wonder if it's this DCO that still needs work.ahcox - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
What is the accuracy of the image labelled "K1-64 Die Shot Mock-up"? Is it a colorized and enhanced version of a real die photograph or is it a pure invention? That 16 * 12 array dominating the picture seems a little off to me: surely there should be structures common to each 16*2 group forming an SMX? Kepler is not a simple tiled sea of cores.