The Samsung Galaxy Note7 (S820) Review
by Joshua Ho on August 16, 2016 9:00 AM ESTIC Design Wins
While we normally allude to the various things that we find in a phone in the interest of providing some extra depth for posterity I went ahead and dug through the software to find all the various peripherals that are present in the Galaxy Note7. For example, the Wacom digitizer identifies itself as the W9010 over i2c, which is interesting considering that this digitizer is the same one found in the Galaxy Note 3. In various briefings it was explicitly said that the digitizer supports double the number of pressure levels, so I’m not sure how this is achieved or if it really has any changes at all besides the smaller tip.
Moving past the Wacom digitizer we can see that there are a number of supporting ICs for power management and things like the battery charger. I’m not going to spend a ton of time talking about this but a huge number of these are Maxim Integrated ICs such as the MAX77838 switching regulator/PMIC, although I’m not clear on exactly what this PMIC supplies. There’s also the MAX77854 which functions as a PMIC, as well as a MAX98506 class D audio amplifier for the codec, which is likely used to drive things like the earpiece, speaker, and 3.5mm jack. This is shared with the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge and it looks like it uses the same WCD9335 audio codec so I wouldn’t get my hopes up about improved audio quality for the Snapdragon variants. If you want better audio you’re going to have to look towards the Exynos variant or the HTC 10.
Moving to slightly more boring but critical parts of the Note7 there are ICs like Cypress CapSense PSoC which enables the capacitive buttons and a TI BQ25898S battery charger IC which supports 9V and 12V charging voltages for adaptive fast charge. There’s also an NXP PN547 NFC controller and an NXP P61 secure microcontroller that seems to be for payments and similar applications. It should also probably surprise no one that there’s a Validity/Synaptics VFS7xxx fingerprint scanner here, although I found some mention of an Egis Technologies ET320 fingerprint scanner which makes me wonder whether Samsung is dual sourcing here.
The more esoteric ICs here include a Richwave RTC6213N FM radio tuner and a CEVA DBMD4 DSP which seems to be for always-on voice commands which are visible on i2c and SPI respectively. The only IC that I can’t identify at all is something called the SX9320 over i2c, which officially has zero mentions on the internet unless you count a Shacman trailer that is manufactured by Shaanxi Automobile Group in China or NGK spark plugs. At any rate, looking at these kinds of details it’s much more apparent just how critical economies of scale are as these are parts that seem to be shared across the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, which surely helps to drive down cost due to the sheer volume of these devices. There are also things like FM tuners which aren’t necessarily going to be a point of advertising for a phone but are neat to have anyways.
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lilmoe - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
SD820 has the power more fluidly? Yes. Better than Exynos? Ummm... No.If you want smoother UI and better touch response, root and change the governor to Performance, or Ondemand.
lilmoe - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
I've dug a little deeper into this after I bought my GS7e (Exynos). Looks like Exynos (and it's higher count of cores) plays better than the Snapdragon with the Conservative Governor that Samsung employs to save battery life. You can manually switch it to Ondemand, Interactive, or even better, Performance (eliminating most of the UI performance differences, and increase the responsiveness of the device drastically). But battery life would take a major hit, just like every other Android device with a 1440p screen.What needs to fixed and optimized is ANDROID. Google still insists on doing a crappy job with their OS, just like with their browser.
lilmoe - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
"What needs to fixed and optimized is ANDROID. Google still insists on doing a crappy job with their OS, just like with their browser."What also needs to be fixed is the "higher resolutions screen is better" mentality. No smartphone should have more than a 1080p panel for optimal performance and efficiency.
There's absolutely no mention of the new power saving features that the new version of TouchWiz employs; like scaling down the resolution and how much more battery life you get out of that. Guess I'll have to test it myself when my GS7 gets the update. I'm soooooooooooooooooooooo scaling back the resolution to 1080p while leaving processing power intact.
InspectHerGadget - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
Yes. The extra screen resolution is not worth the hit on battery life. Android and Samsung are also both to blame for poor optimisations. I had the Nokia 1520 which had great battery life, then the Note 5 which had only so so battery life, now the iPhone 6S Plus which has great battery life. On the Note 5 if I left the hotspot on it would get hot and drain the battery even when my Microsoft Pro 4 was in its case. I just felt too many rough edges on Samsung phones I had.jospoortvliet - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Remember, guys, amoled isn't hit by lower efficiency on higher resolution, that is only an LCD problem. Now granted the gpu and cpu have to work a little harder but 1080P wouldn't look nice with pentile and Samsung does pentile to get a better endurance/longevity and brightness out of AMOLED. I don't think they made the wrong choice here. And yes, 1440P on an LCD is stupid.lilmoe - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
Sorry, the governor they use is Interactive, not conservative...jospoortvliet - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Then it shouldn't be an issue and if it is - they shold fix the governor not switch to performance. The performance governor is barely faster at big costs.lilmoe - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
It doesn't act like an Interactive governor would act at all, it's very slow to ramp up clock speed, and most ramps up the little cores. It's a good thing for battery life, but not as good for fluidity.jospoortvliet - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
IMHO the on demand governor should really not be costing battery life. It was designed to be a good balance and it generally is, at least on desktop.Then again with such an outdated kernel with patches who knows what is in there... wish the android vendors would get their stuff up streamed more timely...
grayson_carr - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
It's a conscious decision happening at Samsung. They could tweak the kernel / governor configuration so that there are almost no frame drops and slowdowns, but it would come at the cost of battery life. Samsung is aiming for the minimum performance they think their users won't be annoyed with in order to maximize battery life, which Samsung assumes is more important to the average user. Google on the other hand configures their devices so that they maintain 60 fps in most scenarios, and their battery life suffers for it. I personally prefer Google's approach because I value a smoother and stutter free UI more than a little extra battery life, but I think a lot of people who buy Nexus devices are baffled as to why the battery life isn't as good as their Samsung phone even though the battery is just as large. Those people may prefer battery life over the smoothest UI possible.