Nexus 5 With Android 4.4 and Snapdragon 800 Challenges Apple A7 In Benchmarks

MojoKid writes "One of the hallmark features of Google's Nexus 5 flagship smartphone by LG isn't its bodaciously big 5-inch HD display, its 8MP camera, or its "OK Google" voice commands. That has all been done before. What does stand out about the Nexus 5 is Google's new Android 4.4 Kit Kat OS and LG's SoC (System on Chip) processor of choice, namely Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 quad-core. Qualcomm is known for licensing ARM core technology and making it their own; and Qualcomm's latest Krait 400 quad-core along with the Adreno 330 GPU that comprise the Snapdragon 800, is a powerful beast. Google also has taken the scalpel to Kit Kat in all the right places, whittling down the overall footprint of the OS, so it's more efficient on lower-end devices and also offers faster multitasking. Specifically memory usage has been optimized in a number of areas. Couple these OS tweaks with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 and you end up with a smartphone that hugs the corners and lights 'em up on the straights. Putting the Nexus 5 through its paces, it turns out preliminary figures are promising. In fact, the Nexus 5 actually was able to surpass the iPhone 5s with Apple's 64-bit A7 processor in a few tests and goes toe to toe with it in gaming and graphics." Ars Technica has a similarly positive view of the hardware aspects of the phone, dinging it slightly for its camera but otherwise finding little to fault.

Comments

This is not a fair comparison

[giorgist]

This is not a fair comparison, the iPhone is twice the price.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Desler]

And the Nexus 5 has a SoC with 2 more cores, 80% higher max clock rate and double the RAM. That it can only keep up is pretty amusing.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Possibly in some cases. But there are plenty of new iphone users. The original iphone caught on because it did stuff no other available device did (or at least not as well). Playing DRM content off iTunes was only a small part of that.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[whoever57]

You've got a Quad-Core ARM running at twice their Ghz and you barely post benchmarks ahead of a Dual-Core A7, you know you're stupid for buying one.

No. you are stupid for basing your decisions on factors that don't affect your usage of the device. All that matters is how fast it brings up web pages, runs apps, etc., battery life, size and other factors such as features the OS and ecosystem provides. The clock rate of the processor is not relevant to the user.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[timeOday]

That's no different than claiming the A7 is pathetic for needing 64 bit registers to do what the SnapDragon does with 32. Which is to say, very silly.

Now, if double cores and double the MHz give the Nexus 5 less battery life than the iPhone, then you have a leg to stand on.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[MacDork]

You've got a Quad-Core ARM running at twice their Ghz and you barely post benchmarks ahead of a Dual-Core A7, you know you're stupid for buying one.

Stupid for buying a faster phone at half the price? You have a strange concept of stupid :-)

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[smash]

Also, i forgot another big reason: after-sales customer service. Apple does well at this, with OS upgrades, repairs and other support.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AcidPenguin9873]

Quad core doesn't help you on single-threaded, lightly-threaded, or GPU benchmarks, which is most of the benchmarks that I saw in the article. That means you can't say that Krait sucks because it has four cores and barely beats a dual core, since the four cores aren't being utilized. The conclusion you can draw is that a quad core CPU isn't necessary for a good user experience on a phone.

And needing a faster clock to reach the same performance levels isn't a meaningful metric either, at least not in a phone. In a phone that is power-constrained, the metric is performance per watt. If both CPUs burn the same power and give the same performance, they're basically equivalent. How each chooses to provide that performance is immaterial in a phone which is a power-constrained environment. Maybe the Apple CPU has some performance headroom at higher power budgets if it could run at a faster frequency (thus providing higher perf at the same freq as the Krait core), but that doesn't help you if it has to run throttled at all times so as to not blow through the phone's battery life and/or burn your pants.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[prowler1]

The most common reason I usually get from non-technical people on why they want or why they purchased an iPhone (or iPad) was because they are 'cool' or 'trendy'. None of them has been able to tell me why or what features it has or does better than any of its competitors. Simply put, they didn't give a damn about how well their device functions when they use it, just the image they can reflect or inherit by owning one.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[rocket rancher]

And the Nexus 5 has a SoC with 2 more cores, 80% higher max clock rate and double the RAM. That it can only keep up is pretty amusing.

What is amusing is that the Nexus 5 costs half what the iPhone does. Apple's target demographic has always been people with more money than brains. Thwok....ball's in your court.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AmiMoJo]

Open: Android is "open" in the "open cathedral" sense. It's very difficult to just jump in, make a few alterations, and see the changes running on your device.

Wait, are you an app developer or an OS developer? Most app developers don't try to patch the OS. At least on Android you can submit patches, on iOS there is no way to do that. AOSP isn't hard to interact with, compared to say the Linux kernel or BSD.

Yes, Apple have the ultimate say-so on what's allowed on the App Store. Yes, that's a big deal.

Apple can make you waste vast amount of money developing something only for it to be blocked, and then copied by Apple themselves. That's more than a big deal. It's hard to get projects approved when managers see this happening.

But with Android, you have to contend with thousands of different models, each with their own shitty customisations that break things.

Only if you are a terrible programmer. Like most operating systems Android runs on multiple platforms and offers stable APIs to interact with that hardware. Just like you wouldn't design your Windows or Linux app to run at 800x600 and then get upset when people find it looks crap on their 1920x1200 monitor you should not be developing Android apps that are tailored to specific hardware.

Can you provide any concrete examples of standard Android API functions that are broken on popular Android devices? The worst I have seen is some flaky Bluetooth drivers, but those are down to the phone manufacturer in the same way you wouldn't call Windows broken because Dell ship broken drivers with some of their computers.

99% of the time, it's when the client is asking for us to do something user-hostile.

You mean like develop an alternative HTML rendering engine, or set up their own app/book/music/video store, or write a better SMS messaging system, or port their keyboard from Android, or some nefarious scheme like that?

Masses of people don't upgrade, and more than a quarter of Android users are still on Gingerbread, released almost three years ago.

31% of desktops are still running Windows XP, which was released in 2002. Of course that doesn't tell the whole story. .NET 4 is available for Windows XP, just like how many of the newer features in Android are available via non-OS updates that everyone gets via Play.

This really isn't the big issue crap programmers make it out to be. The API is stable, it's easy to deal with the differences and if a feature isn't available in Gingerbread there probably isn't any point trying to hack around it because devices of that age won't support it anyway. Can you point to any specific functions that have caused you problems, or is this just a general rant?

It takes less than a year for about 95% of iOS users to upgrade to the latest version.

Yes, and now you get complaints that your app is dog slow because the OS runs like a dog on older hardware, but users were not clever enough to block the update and can't downgrade.

It was a shitty vendor customisation.

Simple solution, don't buy from shitty vendors. Really, your argument is that once you bought a gas hob cooker and it was awful, leaked gas and eventually exploded burning your house down, therefore all gas hob cookers are shit and electric induction is the only way to go.

I dislike the controlling attitude of Apple and I dislike how much power they have in the mobile market.

No, you love it. You want your hand held. You want everyone to have a practically forced OS update with no downgrades, even if it makes their phone terribly slow. You want strictly controlled hardware and no choice about it so that you don't have to use your brain when writing apps.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you are a terrible programmer

Don't be a jerk, there are things outside your control. I still haven't found a video file format which works on all Android phones. On iOS it's an mp4, but on Android we always get the "hey, my phone doesn't play this" shit. Yeah, terrible programmer, those making Android suck so much.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[jo_ham]

And the Nexus 5 has a SoC with 2 more cores, 80% higher max clock rate and double the RAM. That it can only keep up is pretty amusing.

What is amusing is that the Nexus 5 costs half what the iPhone does. Apple's target demographic has always been people with more money than brains. Thwok....ball's in your court.

That's not really an argument.

Remove the word "Apple" from your argument and you're essentially saying that anyone who buys any product that costs more than the absolute cheapest product available in that class is an idiot.

This sort of bell curve of product purchasing is totally accepted in everyday life (cars, food, houses, sports equipment, televisions, jewellery, books, entertainment, holidays...) but somehow when the same metric is applied to computers, unless you buy from the bottom of the discount bargain bin, you're suddenly an idiot.

It's certainly a strange argument coming from the corner than claims to promote user choice. Or is it only the right choice if they make the same choice that you do? Anything else is the consumer clearly demonstrating they have "more money than brains"? Is it part of the Android experience to not just enjoy the phone and ecosystem you selected based on your own criteria, but also to insult anyone who had a different set of selection criteria to you? Put another way; I don't think all Android users are idiots for not choosing iOS, or OS X.

As is predictable in this thread, when Apple is on top on benchmarks, suddenly they don't matter. When Apple is behind on benchmarks they get bashed for having "expensive, old hardware that can't keep up". In other words, the argument positions between the extremes of the camps swaps over. Still, the underlying "if you didn't buy an Android you have more money than brains" always persists.

Thwok; ball is back in your court.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AmiMoJo]

If I want to, say, modify my Xperia Pro so that a particular application that is useless to me isn't forcibly bundled, it's far more difficult than it should be.

That has nothing to do with Android and everything to do with Sony not wanting you to modify their proprietary ROM images. Also, how is it any worse than iOS which provides no mechanism at all?

Which means nothing when vendors customise the implementations of those APIs and break them.

Can you point to a specific example of a vendor doing this? I don't know of any. In fact one of the requirements of shipping a device with "Android" on it (as opposed to some custom OS that can't be called "Android", like the Kindle Fire OS) is that you don't break the standard APIs. There wouldn't really be any point doing that anyway as you would just get complains that apps don't work on your phone.

On another device, the rendering was completely fucked in some way, something like being a tenth of the size they should be or something.

Definitely sounds like a problem with your code, The Android Compatibility Test Suite checks for things like incorrect rendering settings when using the standard APIs, and vendors are required to use it if they want to use the Android trademark. Otherwise it's not Android, it's their own concoction.

No, not everyone gets via Play. You're confusing Play with Android. You don't have to license Play to deploy Android.

99% of Android devices have Play. Those that don't are almost all locked down by the manufacturer so you can't install any 3rd party apps other than the ones on their own market anyway, so are irrelevant to you.

You are repeatedly insinuating that we are crap developers simply because I am pointing out problems with Android.

No, I'm insinuating you are crap developers because you think there are problems with Android when in fact they are problems with your code or it wasn't even Android you were running on. You might want to think about that.

What are the non-shitty Android vendors? Because I was buying flagship phones with good reviews from mainstream vendors like Sony.

Sony are kinda shitty, especially with updates. They have tried to do better lately, but it remains to be seen if they have really made progress.

Obviously Google's devices are the best if you have a boner for running the latest version. Being a developer those would be the ones to go for. If you can stand to wait a few months for point releases Samsung are pretty good too.

Which Google phone did you have? What are you claiming was wrong with it?

Once you stop arguing against what I am saying, and put words in my mouth that are the opposite of what I believe, there really isn't much discussion to be had.

I was pointing out that you say you don't like Apple's policies, but prior to that complained about all the things you think are wrong with Android that stem from not having those policies. Devices don't always run the latest version of the OS because Google doesn't force vendors to release it for all current models and then ban downgrades. You complain about hardware variations because Google doesn't mandate one hardware platform with no variations. You seem to be saying that everything you "hate" about Apple's control over iOS is what makes it superior to Android, and that you think it is a good thing.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it's actually worse than that. A phone that has a SoC with double the cores, cores that have a max clock rate 1 ghz higher and double the memory is only able to win in a couple of tests and just keep up with the A7 in every other test. Sounds like pretty fail.

You still don't get it! Specs do not matter...

[bogaboga]

Qualcomm's latest Krait 400 quad-core along with the Adreno 330 GPU that comprise the Snapdragon 800, is a powerful beast.

If they had not focused much on the specs, but rather on battery life that can last a day of average use, I'd be happier. I ask my self: -

"Of what use is having the"latest and greatest if by mid-afternoon, I will be holding a brick in hand?

This is what I do to these good phones that are limited in the battery department. I underclock them with acceptable results.

By the way: Can one explain to me how Motorola was able to cram a 3000mAH into a phone smaller than this but Google and its LG partner cannot?

Breathtaking Ignorance

[SuperKendall]

The original iPhone caught on because it could play DRM iTunes.

You know, I don't think I've ever seen as horribly misguided a reason for the adoption of the iPhone as that one.

By your logic, the Motorola ROKR would have been a smash hit.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[binarylarry]

Yeah but that phone is half the price of the iPhone.

Pretty impressive to me.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[smash]

Sony could release a phone that claimed to cure cancer, solve world poverty and establish peace in the middle east. They're still not getting a cent of my disposable income.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[stenvar]

Yup, because burning CPU cycles at twice the rate to run "fast enough" is the way to awesome battery life.

It makes no difference to battery life; almost all the battery usage on Android phones goes to the display and the radio. And CPU-bound applications (e.g., PhotoSphere) are written using native code anyway.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[citizenr]

whereas apple made the decision and bet on ARM.

Apple has experience and proven track record in quickly changing archs. If anything new cpu arch would mean more money for them - forced upgrade cycle in ecosystem where users currently upgrade almost only when old stuff breaks or new one looks nicer.

Re:Is it a phone ?

[dreamchaser]

I am curious...

Before the 20th Century did the average person drive an automobile?

Before the Industrial Revolution did the average person have access to cheap, mass produced good?

Before the Agricultural Revolution, did the average person have access to plentiful grain?

Before the Paleolithic, did the average person have access to crafted stone tools?

Don't get me wrong, I'm just curious...