Galaxy S 4 Dominates In Early Benchmark Testing

redkemper writes with an excerpt from BGR.com of interest to anyone in the market for a new phone: "Samsung's Galaxy S 4 might not offer much in the way of an exciting new exterior design, but inside, it's a completely different story. The retooled internals on the U.S. version of the Galaxy S 4 were put to the test by benchmark specialists Primate Labs and the results are impressive, to say the least. The Galaxy S 4 scored a 3,163 on the standard Geekbench 2 speed test, just shy of twice the iPhone 5's score of 1,596. That score was also good enough to top the upcoming HTC One, the Nexus 4 and the previous-generation Galaxy S III."

Comments

It's a friggin' phone

[TWX]

I've had two smartphones now, the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream, and the Samsung Galaxy SII. It's not about the phone speed, it's about the applications and the connectivity. If my wife's Palm T|X was a phone and had the ability to synch to a server automagically like Android does with Google's applications, she'd probably still be using it. Having the web is nice, but having the e-mail, calendar, contact list, music player, e-book reader, camera, picture viewer, and calculator are what make the device so useful. For me, it's a tool first and foremost, and the toy gadgets aren't what make it why I carry it.

iPhone is not cutting edge

[SpaceMonkies]

The iPhone is definitely not cutting edge technology, despite what some people believe. The iPhone is more the tried and true stuff, although I think most people use it for the software, not the hardware. However, for those who like power and fun in their pockets, the S4 is the bomb.

Re:iPhone is not cutting edge

[alen]

the CPU and GPU in the iphone 5 were cutting edge for 2012.
i'm playing Real Racing 3 and the graphics are about as good as the xbox

MHz or GHz speed has never been a good predictor of actual processing power. Intel sold 4GHz CPU's 10 years ago. the 2GHz ones they sell now are A LOT faster

cpu/gpu architecture and the having the software actually take advantage of the hardware features will give you better performance than paper specs

Re:But not the Z10?

[Junta]

You mean like they did, right in the article? It comes up just shy of iPhone 5.

Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Archangel Michael]

http://www.androidauthority.com/galaxy-s4-not-cyanogenmod-support-174322/

Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None. They've complained that the Galaxy models are too hard to keep working. The strange thing about it, Cyanogen works for Samsung on their Android Team.

Question is, will that affect your decision to buy or not buy the Galaxy S4.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[alen]

if i was to leave iphone for android it would be the S4 or the Note

couldn't care less about rooting and tooting. its like the shade tree mechanics of 30 years ago. people have nothing better to do with their devices.

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Riddler Sensei]

CyanogenMod is posting across social networks that this is just the opinion of some of the devs, but is not the stance of project.

Found on G+ just now:

Let’s start with the simplest form of this: CyanogenMod does not pre-announce support or lack of support for devices. Ever. Even for the Nexus 4, we did not announce support until a nightly build was available. Further, any announcement regarding the ‘dropping’ of device support will be communicated via this Google+ page, Twitter, Facebook, our blog, or a combination of those; it will not be something buried in a forum post.

This morning, a comment from a CM collaborator on XDA was taken to be as an ‘absolute’ in regards to support of the S4. He offered the opinion of four TeamHacksung maintainers, their frustrations and lack of interest in supporting the S4. What’s seemingly lost on those reading this is that his comments as an individual do not speak for CyanogenMod as an organization.

As for the team’s stance on the S4, there isn’t one at this time, and most definitely won’t be one before the device is sold at retail.

-The CyanogenMod Team

Re:Cyanogenmod not on Galaxy S4

[Andy Dodd]

Not entirely true.

There are two major variants of the Galaxy S4 - Qualcomm and Exynos based. Similarly there are two major subvariants of the GS3 - again, Qualcomm vs. Exynos.

The Qualcomm-based GS3s were very well supported thanks to Qualcomm having excellent reference source at CodeAurora.

The Qualcomm-based GS4s will probably be OK because many of the Qualcomm GS3 maintainers aren't as pissed off at Samsung as the Exynos guys (including myself) are.

The four primary Exynos4 maintainers (myself, Daniel Hillenbrand, Guillaume Lesniak, and Espen Fjallvar Olson - I may have missppelled thos slightly as we usually just go by IRC nicks) have all decided that we won't be touching any further Samsungs. We're all working with Nexus or Sony devices now. (Sony has done a MAJOR turnaround in terms of opensource support over the past year, or at least the Mobile division has.)

This probably has little impact on the Qualcomm-based GS4s, but right now, the Exynos-based GS4s are without any prospective maintainers.

Will a new maintainer step up? Possibly. Will they succeed without just saying "fuck this shit" and selling the phone for a different one? I personlly don't think so.

It's a volunteer project so nothing is ever a surefire given, and collective decisions are rarely made - so far, they have only been made in regards to outdated hardware and newer versions of Android. (Such as Snapdragon S1-based phones ending at CM7).

That said, if you look at the attitudes of developers, you can "get a feel" for how likely a phone is going to be well supported by CM.
DISCLAIMER: THE BELOW IS MY PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT IN ANY WAY AN OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE PROJECT:
Will the Qualcomm-based GS4s receive maintainer attention and continued support including M and stable builds? I'd be surprised if they didn't.
Will the Exynos-based GS4s receive maintainer attention and M/stable CM builds? I'd be very surprised if they do.

Re:funny thing is

[niftydude]

sgs 3 is better than iphone5 in that chart

The international sgs 3 is better, the US sgs 3 isn't.

I was never sure why samsung put a slower soc in the phones that went to the US.

Does that mean...

[SailorSpork]

...those birds will look TWICE as angry on a Galaxy S 4 as they do on an iPhone 5? IN!

oh that's right

[slashmydots]

Wow, now it's fast enough to run Crysis 3! Oh wait...that's right, it's a phone. Apps are written for the slowest Android devices for the biggest marketability so that speed means nothing and does nothing but waste battery life. Maybe it can process photos faster with a built-in app or something faster but who cares? Most people run 3rd party apps the vast majority of the time. I would much, much, much rather see a doubling of the battery life than a doubling of the processor speed.

Re:funny thing is

[GNious]

I'm more surprised that they were so close.... That's actually a vote in favour of the Apple offering, because Apple's slower processor with half the processing cores will use less battery....

Is not quite that simple - the quad-core 1.4GHz might be able to finish some intensive operations significantly faster than the dual-core 1.3GHz, allowing it to go back to a low-power state earlier and save more battery.

what's the killer ap for bigger CPU on cell phone

[goombah99]

what's the killer app for increased CPU?

why do I need such a powerful computation engine in my pocket? the main use I see is if it gets to be good enough to be a desktop replacement and I can just dock it to a big screen. But until then having more cpu or GPU isn't going to let be surf the internet faster or type e-mail faster or even give me longer battery life. THe existing ones already play HD movies so the frame rate threshold has been reached for highly satisfactory video.

SO what's the killer app for increased CPU? playing halo? Nice but not a killer app for a cell phone I think. I just can't think of anything in terms of compuational horsepower that I would like my cell phone to do that it doesn't do now and for which the cell platform is the right place to do it. I need help with my imagination I guess.

For me the thing I need on my cell phone is vastly more battery. Why? Well aside from the obvious of longer charge time, you could probably vastly increase the communication rate and reliability by broadcasting more power. You could certainly increase the amount of time you would be tempted to use video (battery consumers).

Re:funny thing is

[olsmeister]

The faster Samsung processor used in the international versions didn't work with the 4G LTE that we have in the States.

Re:funny thing is

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Qualcomm's "Snapdragon has good in-package support for cellular flavors in common use in the US. As can be seen in the wikipedia list, that puts them in quite a few US-release phones, even from people like Samsung who have their own SoCs.

Re:funny thing is

[cristiroma]

Huh!? Your first assumption is incorrect!
Listening to music while system is checking the email in background and you browse a site IS taking advantage of multicore systems on desktop OR a phone, as long as the OS scheduler is multi-core aware. Phones are multicore to accomplish such parallel tasks.
Applications don't need to be aware of multicore. OS scheduler will take care of that.