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

[auzy]

It kind of is. Of course, this excludes the fact that Android Apps are actually portable (unlike iPhone apps), and ultimately, when Google implements ART instead of Dalvik, Android will be significantly more competitive in performance (these benchmarks don't test the hardware exclusively, but the software environment also).

We can also install other Android builds easily on the Nexus phones, and so are able to do things, which are impossible on Apple (without risking completely messing up the phone on upgrades, such as screen recording).

Long term, Android is a better solution, and is is a more open environment, is less hostile to develop for, and I've found that my Nexus 5 is so snappy anyway, that the speed is irrelevent at this time. And yes, I have 3 other people in the office who are iPhone fans and my Nexus 5 has helped convert 2 of them, who are sick of all the small annoyances by Apple, such as getting cut by the broken glass backing of their iPhone (and the fact that on HSDPA/Wifi iPads for a very long time, we found they kept prioritising the HSDPA, making it painful for automation).

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]

Not trolling. Pointing out that vast numbers of people buy the iPhone despite it costing 2x as much. And this is despite the fact that most people are cheap - hence VHS winning against Betamax, Hyundai being way more popular than BMW, etc. It's also why most android handsets are not Nexus 5s or Galaxy 4s.

There are reasons for people buying iPhones despite all this. Chief amongst them is that the average Joe DOES NOT CARE about what the numbers are with synthetic benchmarks, number of pixels on screen, etc. They care about how well a device performance the functions they want it to do. Despite what many in the slashdot crowd may think, things like look and feel, UI consistency, battery life and integration with other devices and services is important.

The raw numbers are pretty irrelevant for everybody outside a very small subset of the population. For so many people to be buying iphones despite being "2x the price", there must be something they value in the device, otherwise they wouldn't be buying it.

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

[ahabswhale]

Actually, if you look at the benchmarks it loses in everything but the GL benchmarks. Then go and look at the benchmarks at phonearena and the 5S hands the Nexus 5 it's ass on pretty much every test. Personally I'll reserve final judgement until I see an anadtech comparison but looking at everything out there right now, the Nexus 5 doesn't hold a candle to the iPhone 5s. That's not to say it's a bad phone, because it isn't. I'm just saying you're buying a fantasy if you think this thing is on par with the 5S.

Before I get called an Apple fanboy, you should know that I own two phones and they are both Samsung Android phones.

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

[Bogtha]

I think I'm qualified to comment on this. I've been an iOS developer since 2008. My company makes iOS and Android applications. I used flagship Android phones from 2008-2012 before switching to the iPhone. So I've had a lot of experience with both platforms from both the user and developer sides.

I think Android phones are terrible in comparison to iPhones. The reason why I started out with Android phones was for the reasons you outline - more open, and more flexible. I quickly discovered that wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The reason why I stayed with Android for so long was that a) I was holding out hope that it would be better in the long run and b) I wanted a hardware keyboard.

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. Practically speaking, it's not developed in an open sense in the same way most open source projects are. You could write a book about the implications this has and how it undermines the benefits open source normally provides.

Less hostile to develop for: not a chance. Yes, Apple have the ultimate say-so on what's allowed on the App Store. Yes, that's a big deal. But with Android, you have to contend with thousands of different models, each with their own shitty customisations that break things. We deployed an application last week for Android. It was finished weeks beforehand for iOS. Despite only having to target three recent Android tablets (it was an in-house project), each tablet was broken in different ways. iOS development is a breeze by comparison.

The problem with producing applications for the iPhone is Apple's policies. That's not a development obstacle, that's a policy issue. As we are a digital agency, all this really means for us is that we can say "Apple won't allow that" to clients when they ask for us to do something that Apple won't allow. And you know what? 99% of the time, it's when the client is asking for us to do something user-hostile.

The problem with producing applications for Android is development. The client asks for the feature, there's no intrinsic reason why it can't be done, but in practice you find that what should work and what does work on various devices differs radically.

Then there's the upgrade issue. I've done a lot of web development. Android is the Internet Explorer 6 of the mobile world. Masses of people don't upgrade, and more than a quarter of Android users are still on Gingerbread, released almost three years ago. It takes less than a year for about 95% of iOS users to upgrade to the latest version.

This isn't just a developer problem, it's a user problem as well. When I bought my last Android phone, it was a flagship Sony phone shipped with 2.3 that they had committed to upgrading to 4.0. That's the only reason I gave in and stayed with Android. The promise that I might actually stay up to date for once. Sure enough, they broke that promise. But they dragged it out for a year saying that they would do it. Meanwhile, the version of Android I was stuck on had a bug that rendered my SIP phone line useless.

You lose features too. Remember when OTA upgrades were an advantage over iOS? The year before iOS added that feature, I got an Android upgrade that took that feature away. It was a shitty vendor customisation. I had to use a buggy desktop application that crashed my computer to upgrade Android. When I switched vendors? Same thing, but with a completely different buggy desktop application.

Android's a mess. It was a mess for the fours years I was using it, with every single handset I tried, as I was hoping in vain for it to get better. It never got better, in fact the problems with the platform became more numerous over time. It's "openness" is an illusion and is not going to fix the problems it faces.

I disli

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[AmiMoJo]

And that fact is mostly irrelevant. Remember back when AMD started quoting their Athlon processors by speed rating rather than MHz because Intel went all out to get high clock speeds? I thought everyone knew that megahertz were not directly comparable between architectures these days.

In this case Apple has gone down the more complex route with a processor that can do more per clock cycle at the expense of added cost and power consumption. The Snapdragon CPU takes the opposite approach with simpler cores that run at higher clock rates. Such cores are cheaper to manufacture and have power consumption advantages when not running flat out at their maximum clock rate.

Also note that the benchmarks they ran don't saturate all four cores, and neither do most mobile games. The extra RAM helps the phone multitask, and no benchmarks or games use it all on either platform so it's meaningless.

It's pretty amusing that Apple spent so much time and money to develop their CPU and it ended up costing far more than the much simpler and equally fast competition. 64 bit turned out to be completely irrelevant at this stage.

Re:This is not a fair comparison

[TheRaven64]

The smooth scrolling on the iPhone is implemented by the scroll view instructing every view inside one to draw a larger region than is actually composited into the final image. It looks smoother because it's just compositing already-drawn data into the exposed region, rather than having to do all of the rendering on demand. It's a pretty neat trick, but this trick comes at the expense of making the CPU do more work to render bits of a page that may never be seen, and used-CPU means used battery life. I don't know what the total cost is, but Apple has obviously decided that it's worth it and you apparently agree, but it's not a question of CPU speed it's a question of what the widget set does with it.

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

[Bogtha]

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?

I'm not talking about the technical difficulty in writing a patch. I'm talking about the difficulty in applying a patch in practical terms. 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.

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.

I deal with people who commission apps on a regular basis. Unless the entire concept of an application is forbidden by Apple (e.g. porn), it's never been a deal breaker.

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.

Which means nothing when vendors customise the implementations of those APIs and break them. It's all very well saying that, say, the API to draw a control on screen is the same across all devices, but if one device draws the control and another doesn't bother, that's kind of a problem.

Can you provide any concrete examples of standard Android API functions that are broken on popular Android devices?

I don't remember the full details, but the most egregious problem we had was that radio buttons simply weren't showing up on one device. At all. On another device, the rendering was completely fucked in some way, something like being a tenth of the size they should be or something. The code was right, and the application worked just fine on most of our test devices. But on some, they simply didn't work right due to vendor customisations.

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?

Let's be straight here: I'm describing what Apple's policies mean for us in practice, and I'm reporting what clients actually ask us to do. You are scraping everything you can think of that Apple has ever rejected together. I'm sure there are lots of business plans that have fallen by the wayside in the five years Apple have been running the App Store. But that doesn't mean that they are a significant percentage of the apps people actually want to create.

No client has ever asked us to develop an alternative HTML rendering engine. Why would they? Besides, Apple don't have a problem with an alternative HTML rendering engine.

No client has ever asked us to set up their own app store. There are book stores on the App Store already, there's no rule against having a book/music/video store.

Alternative SMS messaging systems aren't against Apple's rules. I've got one on my phone right now.

No client has ever asked us to replace part of the system like a keyboard. If you have an application that needs a custom keyboard, you can implement one for your application, but you can't replace the keyboard in other people's applications.

When I say that the things clients ask us to do are things that are user-hostile, I'm talking about things like hookin

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.

This is going to seem out of place here

[symbolset]

They are both very nice phones. There. I said it.

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?

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[MacDork]

New phone almost as fast as month old phone.

Xperia Z1 was released same day as iPhone 5s. It is faster, waterproof, and has higher res 1080 screen. It also has a 20.7MP camera with a much larger 1/2.3" sensor.

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[Lluc]

the article doesn't touch on this, but I wonder how much untapped power is in that 64bit processor in iPhone. what's cool is, that's dormant in my phone right now, but will be unleashed next year so it will be like getting a new phone.

Please tell me you're being sarcastic... Even if all your apps get recompiled to 64-bit versions, you are not going to get a massive performance boost. Have you ever tried running a 32 vs. 64 bit install of Windows or Linux on the same hardware? Not too much difference for average use cases...

I was testing my N5 against a 5S at lunch today

[YesIAmAScript]

We ran Sunspider (1.0.2).

The iPhone 5S (and a Nokia Lumia 920) pasted my Nexus 5 on Sunspider. Both were about twice as fast as the Nexus 5.

I like the Nexus 5, it's very snappy. But when using it, it doesn't feel faster than a 5S.

The N5 is a heck of a value.

Now, about the awful pictures it takes... Is there any chance a better camera app (which also sucks) can improve them some?

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

[binarylarry]

yeah but if you use your iphone as a media transcoding server, the gains with be iMazing!

Re:Is it a phone ?

[smash]

Yeah because when I am out and about, i much prefer to carrry a map, a compass, a walkman, a mobile phone, a laptop, a pager, a camera, a tape recorder and a gaming console. Fuck those integration guys in the neck.

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: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...

Re:New phone almost as fast as month old phone

[gnasher719]

The main advantage of 64 bitness is access to a far larger memory address space. Yes there can be a few minor performance improvements with proper use of larger registers, but it's really not that big an advantage. Until smartphones and tablets start exceeding 4 gigabytes of RAM there is really not much point other than marketing to use 64 bit code on such devices.

That has been debunked again and again and again.

There has been iOS code that was measured to be 45% faster just by being recompiled to 64 bit. There are plenty of tricks in the Objective-C runtime and the C++ libraries that make it _significantly_ more efficient when running on a 64 bit processor. For example, a std::string up to 22 chars doesn't allocate any memory on the heap in 64 bit code but just uses three 64 bit words.