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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.
...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.
Breaking news! Last year's product slower than this year's product. Film at 11.
End of Line.
LG G5 - now physically bigger, with a smaller screen and smaller battery, and the opportunity to spend an extra $600 on accessories (ahem, "friends") you'll use only once.
(NB: I'm a current G3 & G4 owner, really not impressed with the G5)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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 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.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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