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Galaxy S7 vs iPhone 6S: Samsung Has the Upper-Hand, For Now (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: To look at Samsung's new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones, on the surface, one might mistake them for only a modest uplift of bells and whistles, and perhaps a light rebuffing of the phone's design language. However, one of the primary new features of the US-targeted Samsung Galaxy S7 is its underlying power plant — Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 system-on-a-chip (SoC). The Snapdragon 820 is based on Qualcomm's new, custom ARM-based core architecture called Kyro. Kyro marks an evolution beyond Qualcomm's venerable Krait core architecture that the company claims offers 2X the performance and power efficiency of their previous-gen Snapdragon 810. In addition, the quad-core Snapdragon 820 has a beefed-up Adreno 530 graphics engine on board as well. In performance testing versus Apple's potent A9 platform in the iPhone 6S Plus, Samsung's Galaxy S7 with the Snapdragon 820 generally outpaces the iPhone in multithreaded performance as well as graphics. The Apple A9 still does a lot of work with just two cores, but overall it looks as though Qualcomm has a highly-competitive SoC and Samsung put it to good use.
... can you plan Doom on it?
I'm waiting the video!
They call it marshmallow.
What the people really want to know is how FBI Mode performs on new devices. -PCP
will the real winners please raise your mouses? or just smile & wave? that's me tapping on the screen... thanks
fast CPU, planned obsolescence with a soldered-in battery? Yeah, no. The LG G5 is supposed to be a solid choice.'
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
...touchwiz
See the problem here is that it's not an even comparison.
When you compare performance you ONLY compare the single-thread performance, because that is most reflective of real-world performance. Multi-threaded performance is seldom a useful metric, and is rare used properly, especially on Android devices. That's why Apple gets by with smaller batteries and balanced CPU's, while Samsung sticks undersized batteries for the CPU they use.
But when you then look at GPU performance, Samsung rarely puts a powerful GPU part in their devices, and that is reflected by devices that appear to nudge out Apple's devices in raw performance, but under synthetic benchmarks, the power management throttles back the GPU more on the Samsung devices, thus the real performance is less.
Ultimately you pick the device that will last you the longest, or use the apps you want to use, and for most people that's the Apple ecosystem. The average person shouldn't be buying an Android device without getting some guarantee that it will run all future versions of Android, otherwise you're just throwing away money.
two different articles both say the other is better...
you have the article from this post and i see this post just the other day by the New York Post... i dont put a lot of faith in the New York Posts articles, but people always clamoring that another product is better based off of this or that.
Sorry for the bad link. I'm not one to usually post i mostly just come hear to find interesting news.
http://nypost.com/2016/03/08/your-old-iphone-is-way-faster-than-samsungs-new-galaxy/
Quality news Timothy
Obviously it's unfair to pit a model 7 against a model 6! /sarcasm
That's weird. Most Africans have an average IQ of 80. Your post suggests that it is much higher than that. How many of your ancestors had consensual sex with white people?
Seriously ... words without meaning ....
and perhaps a light rebuffing of the phone's design language.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'm still really happy with my S5 after over a year. It will probably do for another year or two. It gets a bit hot sometimes but it hasn't melted yet. When they decided to be Apple they only really succeeded in becoming inapplicable. I didn't by the S5 because I wanted an iPhone that runs Android. Things like removable battery, SD card slot are important and the water proofing is just great. The only thing I really hated with the S5 was their stock distro which you couldn't strip down or remove crapware from so you have to go cyanogen mod just to have your own clean unpolluted personal device. The S7 takes a step towards Samsung restoring their glory but I'm really not a fan of the integrated battery. If I want to buy spares for long a long journey, etc then I can't.
And how the S7 edges the iphone "slightly".
instead of a title: "Galaxy S7 vs iPhone 6S: Samsung Has the Upper-Hand, For Now " .... this post should be "/. community vs Corporate MSM: MSM Has the Upper-Hand, For Now "... this article felt like product placement...
A few years back, these companies made some g-- some okay stuff (though Samsung Galaxy was better), but now neither one has removable batteries. A couple years later when you have an otherwise-perfectly-good phone, into the trash it goes.
If you're going to settle for a second-rate phone anyway, then forget Galaxy or iPhone, and just get a Nexus 5X. Especially after this week's price drop, it is really hard to find a better buy than the 5X within the "junk phone" category (and face it: that's where Samsung and Apple now are, but neither one can compete).
And if you're not going to settle for a second-rate phone, there are still others out there, where you can replace the battery every two years and easily get up to the 5-6 years that it takes for them to become obsolete. But they aren't made by Apple or Samsung: both of those companies gave up, for whatever reason.
Unfortunately apps that fully utilize 4 cores are few and far between, so take these numbers with a grain of salt, but the 820 seems to handle single-threaded applications better than its predecessors, putting real-world performance on par with the (admittedly 6 month old) Apple A9.
In any case, it's astounding how ARM designs have gone from a decade behind to modern PC level performance in the space of a few years—and they're not done; performance leaps year after year and for once Samsung and TSMC may beat Intel to 10nm. Intel should be worried, especially if AMD manages to become relevant again with Zen.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Okay, so graphics and Multithreaded are faster. But watching videos and web browsing are for more typical usecases for most people, and the Samsung loses heavily.
Look at the browser benchmarks in the page here:
http://anandtech.com/show/1012...
The iPhone 6s is almost twice as fast as every other phone out there, and it came out nearly 6 months ago. I don't view the S7 as competitive, let alone faster. Other companies need to prioritize single-core performance as much as Apple. Multi-threaded performance isn't that big of a deal. This is a phone, not a server*.
-Android Fanboi and proud owner of a Nexus 6
*Yes, I know some power users out there utilize >2 cores on a regular basis. But most users (including myself) do not.
-=Lothsahn=-
I mean REALLY off (in a no firmware backdoor/malware hack that makes it look like it is off, but it isn't way.)
The new iPhone 5E is going to rock serious phonage. Small like the 5 but better than the 6.
All your future is belong to Apple fanboi
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I swear I've seen this non-apple phone vs. apple phone post before...
We have long since reached a point where smartphones are so blazing fast, the latest hardware means little. We need to be comparing the functionality and efficiency of the operating systems themselves. Hardware be damned. The point of a smartphone is getting shit done. At least on the Android side, people are carrying around phones that are years old because they are still super fast and in most cases getting OS upgrades that don't slow anything down to a notable degree. Someone will have to school me on how this works with IOS devices. While I admit to have until recently been an Android user since 2008, I play with iOS devices every chance I get. Personally, as a matter of getting things done, exploring iOS had continuously reaffirmed my usage of the Android platform. Why? Sorry but I am not here to give a review, only to point out reviews of the latest hardware make little sense. I did say I am a former longtime Android user. As someone who is not OS bigoted, playing with different platforms is me giving a fair shake. I even had a Windows Phone for awhile bust decided it was a mistake for me personally. I recently switched to a Blackberry Classic in all of its "antiquated" hardware glory. Why? Because of love the interface and am able to "get shit done" with it faster and more efficiently. How and why? Again, I'm not here to give reviews just point out that at this point we should be looking at things differently.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
... and for most people that's the Apple ecosystem.
According to ComScore, Android still has the lead in market share at 52%, compared to iOS at 44%. So most people don't pick Apple.
While there are 1.5 million apps available in the Apple ecosystem, and 1.6 million in Android's, the vast majority of time (85%) is spent in 5 apps. Few people use more than 25 apps in any month. Those top apps are available in both ecosystems.
The average person shouldn't be buying an Android device without getting some guarantee that it will run all future versions of Android, otherwise you're just throwing away money.
That is quite some guarantee - "all future versions." I'm very frugal and don't abuse my phone. Even I don't think I'd be carrying around a phone that was even 4 years old, let alone expect it to be running some new killer app that required the very latest version of Android.
The Average Person doesn't need some guarantee that their grandkids will be able to fire up their Galaxy 7 50 years from now. I used to be an Apple person - and I don't think any of my iPhones lasted past 2 years. Average Person should buy a phone for what it is, based on the price, and perhaps not worry so much about what their hipster friends think of them.
Oh really.. some time in the future a more powerful phone will be made?!!.. well I'm in shock!!. Or is this just an iFanboi reluctantly admitting an Android phone is more powerful than the latest iphone (again), refusing not to have the last word?
anyone know how nexus compares?
Despite your opinions, it is faster as shown in the benchmarks. You even start by admitting that fact and then ignore yourself. The anandtech benchmark you linked compares apples to oranges. "Safari running on a single thread on an 6s is faster than Chrome on a single thread on the S7" is an extremely cherry picked metric that completely ignores they are different browsers and that you are inherently deciding to ignore that multicore power of the S7. Strange fellow.
"To look at Samsung's new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones, on the surface, one might mistake them for only a modest uplift of bells and whistles, and perhaps a light rebuffing of the phone's design language."
More processing power on a smart phone is just bells and whistles.
Aside from the uber nerd who needs the latest and greatest gadget, who needs a faster smart phone nowadays? My S4 was plenty fast and I only got an S5 because it died on me. What are people doing on their phones that requires all this new power? I'm a gamer and certainly care about stuff like this on my PC but I just have no idea why anyone makes a deal with this on a smart phone
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
WTF? For watching videos and web browsing your CPU performance genuinely doesn't matter, it only needs to be fast enough. What does a "twice as fast" mean for watching videos? You are gonna watch a 30 min video in 15 min or what?
Marketing: "Let's add some extra cores that are only used by benchmark apps so we'll look better in reviews."
Product: "Sure."
Press: "wow, the Samsung he is faster! BuyBuyBuy it!"
User: "bleh"
Apple actually has a pretty advanced chip design team and they don't really fuck around. Remember they shipped a 64bit arm cpu in a flagship product before any other company was even sampling 64bit arm prototypes. Apple has the highest level license from arm (Architecture - They don't just buy premade blocks from arm. They can make their own.) .
Apple gets to tailor their SoCs for their specific needs while pretty much everyone else uses off the shelf parts. Yeah, designing your own chips aint cheap but there are real tradeoffs when you're forced to deal with shortcomings of off the shelf parts.
Google is looking at getting in to what Apple does because they're getting tired of being at Qualcomm's mercy. Qualcomm doesn't think a feature is needed or will sell well? Guess what. You don't get it.
Did you even read the article I posted? By no means did I cherry pick a single benchmark.
From Anandtech's review, the following benchmarks show the iPhone is faster:
Kraken 1.1 (72%)
Octane v2 (68%)
WebXPRT (55%)
Basemark OS II 2.0 System (47%)
Basemark OS II 2.0 Web (7%)
Basemark OS II 2.0 Overall (3%)
The ONLY benchmark that showed it was slower were these two:
Basemark OS II 2.0 Graphics (14%)
Internal NAND Random Write (41%) -- It fared significantly better than the S7 on all other NAND performance metrics, including all read tests.
I decided to ignore the multicore power of the S7 because for most users, it doesn't matter. Most phone CPU usage is <2 cores, and therefore, it's a pointless statistic. In fact, Anandtech didn't even perform a review that exercised the multi-core CPU capabilities of the S7 compared to the iPhone 6s.
-=Lothsahn=-
Agreed. Apple is way ahead of Qualcomm, and has been for a number of years now. The 2.7 CPU in my Nexus 6 was barely competitive with the iPhone when it came out--with a 145% clockspeed advantage! With that clockspeed advantage, you'd expect the CPU to be way way faster.
There's also something to be said for Safari's performance relative to Android Chrome. The Nexus 6 beats the iPhone 6 in the BaseMark II OS - System benchmark by a good margin, but then loses in Sunspider by a factor of 2. There's obviously some significant room for improvement in either the Android or Chrome software stack (or both).
-=Lothsahn=-
Last time I checked, a Snapdragon 820 was a System-on-Chip semiconductor.
This is a picture of a semiconductor
This is a picture of a power plant
And another power plant, which is actually a power plant within a bigger... power plant
Its important that we all speak the same language. That or I'm gonna start calling every square computer I see a "Hard disk"
And there are the real world performance tests , where the 6S trounces the S7 http://bgr.com/2016/03/07/iphone-6s-plus-galaxy-s7-edge-performance-test/
Android ain't helping . It's still java vs native after all and Android needs the extra hardware to keep up with iOS.
I was looking at the Nexus 5X with $150 off with Google Fi as being a very attractive service plan but I've grown to really like a lot of the iOS Apps and would miss them with a move to Android. We have several Nexus models and I really like getting the updates quickly in the Nexus program. I know many that are happy with their Samsung phones - and they're not really looking to upgrade. Phones seem to be mature devices these days and I think that upgrades will decline.
...Samsung didn't completely cripple their amazing hardware with a godawful bastardization of the Android UI...
So, if I buy iPhone I can watch 2 hour movie in, say, 24 minutes, as opposed to, say, 28 minutes on Samsung?
That's a serious advantage.
I wasn't impressed with my work's S6 edge. Bad battery life, its curved edge screen was too sensitive, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I made the same mistake myself.