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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thunderwave_2 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Look at the S7 Exynos stock browser results. Yes, the iPhone 6s still outperforms it, but it isn't exactly "wiping the floor" with it.Also, consider that although the onscreen benchmarks seem to be in its favour, the S7 is rendering almost 4 times the pixels. While the Mali T880/Adreno 530 is ahead though, the iPhone 6s does admittedly have superior sustained performance.
iOS runs less background processes and is less resource intensive than Android, leading to the great battery figures.
trparky - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Which tells me that Samsung didn't equip the device with a strong enough GPU to push the amount of pixels and sustain high frame rates. If you ask me, there's no reason why that device should have such a high pixel count. Once you go past a certain point it becomes nothing but bragging rights.As for iOS running less background processes, that's a good thing. Yeah, Android is pretty bloated under the hood. And then you throw Samsung's garbage on top and you make it even worse. Android's not nearly as optimized as iOS is.
slyronit - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
The device has a high pixel count because it uses a Pentile display, so the effective resolution is always less than advertised. A Pentile 1080p on such a big screen would look like crap.lilmoe - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
It was surpassed in performance and efficiency a long time ago, by the Exynos 7420... The 8890 widened the gap further.I know you guys want to believe that Apple's chips are the best. I feel your pain. But it's not, no matter how many "reviewers" preach browser benchmarks. Geekbench is by no means a legit benchmark. lol.
Even on the GPU side, the PowerVR has long been surpassed.
Stop blaming Google's shortcomings on Samsung, Qualcom and others. Google's _services_ are great, but their software and optimization level is absolute brown stuff. Samsung, LG and everyone else has to literally fix Android before releasing a phone/update...
CloudWiz - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
Performance...only in multi-threaded benchmarks. Twister absolutely destroys A57 in any single-threaded benchmark and since for the vast majority of use cases (i.e. web browsing) the OS only uses one core, the overall user experience is so much better with the A9. Mongoose is catching up but still not at Twister's level.As for efficiency, the modem on the S6 makes it last a ridiculously short amount of time on LTE and even on Wifi the 6s lasts half an hour longer with a battery two-thirds the size of the S6. The 6s Plus lasts a full 2 hours longer with a similar size battery.
The GT7600 was only beaten in GFXBench this year by the Adreno 530 and surpasses both Adreno 530 and the T880MP12 in Basemark (it also has equal performance to the T880 in Manhattan). You make it sound like the GT7600 is multiple generations behind while it is not. It absolutely crushes the Adreno 430 and the T760MP8 in the Exynos 7420. The GX6450 in the A8 was underpowered but the GT7600 is not.
I do hope that at some point Apple adds two Cortex-A53s to help with low power tasks, but given that their dual-core design already achieves insanely good performance (with the A10 seeking to equal the performance of A9X in a mobile device), they might not even need to.
lilmoe - Tuesday, August 16, 2016 - link
"and since for the vast majority of use cases (i.e. web browsing) the OS only uses one core"False. On Android, the vast majority of applications take full advantage of 4 or more cores.
"As for efficiency, the modem on the S6 makes it last a ridiculously short amount of time on LTE and even on Wifi the 6s lasts half an hour longer with a battery two-thirds the size of the S6. The 6s Plus lasts a full 2 hours longer with a similar size battery."
Also, false. As proven by personal experience, with good reception, the modem on the modern Exynos chips can be more efficient than WiFi. What you're seeing in the charts, my friend, is that Safair (or any browser for the matter), is more efficient that Chrome (shocker). What you're also seeing is that, 720p and 1080p are more battery friendly than 1440p (another shocker). It's amazing that the GS6/GS7 can keep up with that much overhead and more pixels to push.
osxandwindows - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
Not really, those cores are waisted cores.The scheduler sucks, therefore making android inefficient overall when it comes to the use of multiple cores.
thunderwave_2 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9518/the-mobile-cpu-...This piece shows that, on the S6 at least, not all of those cores go to waste.
osxandwindows - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Nope, you don't get it.osxandwindows - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I'm not saying it can't use them, I'm saying it can't use them an a way that doesn't affect performance or battery life.