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.

Comments

Faster? No, not even close

[Lothsahn]

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.

Re:Battery

[Zak3056]

I have an LG G4. Not long after I got it, I was in an automobile accident that damaged the screen. The phone was insured from the carrier, but the carrier insisted for no reason I can think of that it should be an issue for my auto insurance policy.

On the plus side, you got a fairly cheap life lesson: never provide more information than necessary. "The screen on my phone is broken" was sufficient to have the phone insurance take care of the problem. "The screen on my phone got broken in a car accident" made it someone else's problem. Pretty much every insurance policy you'll find in almost any area you can buy insurance says something to the effect of "if you have other insurance that covers this, we won't." Since the property was damaged in the accident, your auto insurance would likely have covered the damage, had you submitted that as part of your claim.

Re:*Multicore

[AmiMoJo]

Android makes good use of multiple cores. The OS uses them for tasks like encryption and application optimisation (memory management, async I/O etc.) Many apps use them, like Chrome which does background opening and rendering of tabs, JIT compilation of JavaScript, decoding images etc. The Google keyboard uses threads to handle input, spell checking and prediction. Meanwhile another thread is rendering the UI.

The iPhone looks good in synthetic benchmarks because they are mostly single threaded. For real world use where you are multitasking, opening multiple tabs, typing away, Android with four cores is what you want