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

Apple does in 2 cores what Samsung needs 4 for

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Apple does in 2 cores what Samsung needs 4 for

[UnknowingFool]

Um your link has nothing about whether iPhones will run newer versions of iOS. And the answer is generally upgradeable within a few generations. For example iOS 9 which was released in Sept 2015 will run on iPhone 4S which was released almost 4 years prior. Is it slow? Probably. The OP made a claim which is generally true: On any Android device, you cannot be sure of future compatibility and are at the mercy of a number of factors including the device maker and the carrier.

Re:Apple does in 2 cores what Samsung needs 4 for

[nine-times]

When you compare performance you ONLY compare the single-thread performance...

I would go further and say that if you're comparing phones based on benchmarks, you're kind of missing the point. The speed and efficiency of the process matter, but only insofar as it lets you do something. Very few people are actually going to care about the raw processing power of their phone. They care about features and usability, and processing power only comes into play if it enables additional features, or if it's too lacking and the phone isn't responsive.

A benchmark like battery lifetime matters to people. CPU performance largely doesn't.

Re:Apple does in 2 cores what Samsung needs 4 for

[bigdady92]

Apple has done it's damndest to support hardware back as far as it can go, even the iphone 3GS was getting recent updates and that's 8 (?) years old.

  Google says "You COULD update those devices" and then leaves it upto the manufacturers to handle updates, which they only do if it suits them.

Re:Comparing generations

[hawaiian717]

Breaking news! Last year's product slower than this year's product. Film at 11.

*Multicore

[pushing-robot]

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.

Re:Battery

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.