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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.
Agreed. I'm sitting this generation out -- again. iFIXIT's teardown of the S7 indicates that it's virtually impossible for those like me to replace the battery without damaging the back cover. I'll stick with my S5 until they come to their senses or, I'll have to look at that LG G5.
When will they learn to stop following Apple's lead?
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
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.
Phones are already obsolete by the time the battery goes bad. If you have a reasonable provider, you can upgrade once or twice a year. They'll refurb your old phone, including a new battery, and sell it to someone who doesn't want or can't afford the latest and greatest. I haven't had battery problems until year three or four, so that's never a problem. If I were poor, I wouldn't have a smart phone.
Breaking news! Last year's product slower than this year's product. Film at 11.
End of Line.
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?
I have a smartphone. Now call me crazy, but I don't want to be perpetually paying for a phone, year after year.
As long as this phone continues to do what I need it to do, I plan to stick with it.
#DeleteChrome
Wanting to 'field replace' your battery easily doesn't make you a cheapskate. The battery is extremely important but also fundamentally the easiest part to replace...or at least it should be. I've had phones/devices where the battery 'mysteriously started dying' (e.g. noticeable decrease in battery life far quicker than I'd have expected). I have no desire to have my 'phone upgrade cycle' dictated by the whims of the battery and I can afford to buy a whole freakin' new phone every month if I wanted to.
In fact I have yet to see a phone come out in the last 3 years that has significant new features that would drive me to buy it...I'm not talking 'faster', there's always 'faster' but I dropped out of that type of replacement cycle LONG ago...the single feature that would make me run out & buy a new phone today is a screen I can easily read in sunlight/outdoors. Everything else can be done in software...seriously the marketing for the iPhone 6 used 'O look you can make a still photo move' as some kind of revolutionary 'feature'...its a gimmick...cool for about 2 seconds...
As far as I can tell there's nothing new in the iPhone 6 series that I don't have in my Galaxy Note II (e.g. 'size of screen', 'sufficient processor speed', RAM, SSD card support etc. etc.). And it now looks like these Galaxy S7 series devices aren't going to be much different and if they have a soldered in battery that is WORSE than I have today!