The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 Review
by Andrei Frumusanu on December 2, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
- Ascend Mate 7
- HiSilicon
GPU Performance
The graphics processing unit in the Kirin 925 remains unchanged from the one in the Kirin 920. It's the same ARM Mali T628MP4 running at 600MHz. What did change though, is the software. HiSilicon no longer employs such an aggressive GPU governor logic for the DVFS scaling, but adopted this time a more linear approach that scales from one frequency to the next, making it much less aggressive than the one found in the Honor 6.
In 3DMark 1.2 Unlimited, we see no change compared to the Honor 6, as one would expect. The Physics score, which is dominantly CPU-bound, is more or less also unchanged. The Physics score here is rather low because the GTS mechanism limits the load onto the A7 scores, which have less performance headroom than the A15 cores. I don't see this as too much of a problem in real-world usage as the A7 cores should be able to handle most existing games without much issue, and it's in my opinion even a good thing as it brings down platform power down by quite a bit to avoid using the A15 cores.
Checking in on BaseMark X 1.1, the Mali continues to be underwhelming. The MP4 configuration of the T628 is simply not enough to be able to compete with Qualcomm and Imagination's current high-end GPUs.
In GFXBench 3.0, the Mali is again dragging its feet and is barely capable of competing here. A lack of fill-rate performance is what is limiting it in the T-Rex benchmark, and a bottleneck in ALU power is what is stopping the Mali from performing better in the Manhattan test.
The biggest change I've seen between the Mate 7 and the Honor 6 is the way the GPU throttles. I've mentioned that I've had a hard time to get the Honor 6's GPU to throttle at all, and thus it performed quite well in our performance degradation metric. The Mate 7 seems to have changed its thermal policies and brings with it one of the worst scores we've every seen. It throttles very fast and limits itself to roughly half the frequency, resulting in only 8.8fps from the 15.8fps instant performance score. The result is that the Mate 7 performs much better in the GPU battery test, but before we get to that, let's characterize the screen of the Mate 7 so we can get a good notion of what we should expect in terms of battery life.
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tipoo - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Ach, and that storage performance...Yup, all interest gone.massig93 - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Thanks for the great review! I'm so thankful you review products that are noto exclusively Samsungs, Apples or HTCs. I'd love to see more chinese phones reviews on anandtech (Xiaomi Mi4, Meizu MX4, Nubia Z7, Nubia X6, Huawei Honor X1)protomech - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Any comments on wifi performance? No 802.11ac so not expecting much.The Ascend Mate 2 was an interesting device: inexpensive and fantastic battery life, due to the 2011-class resolution and SOC performance. If you wanted a physically large display and were okay with the lower performance then it was easy to recommend.
There's no reason to recommend this phone.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
I'm still lacking the proper equipment for Wifi tests, but from what I can see the Wifi reception and performance didn't change from the Honor 6.alfredska - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Especially for Android devices, it would be great if you could spend more time discussing a manufacturer's historical commitment to long-term support on their products. This includes: how regularly a product receives OTA updates; how recent the base operating system is (version of Android); whether kernel source is released in a timely manner following each update.In the case of Huawei, I'm very leary, because their first US phone offering, the Mate 2 which was just released this year, still runs Jellybean. While they claim a Lollipop is in its future, this only came after a barrage of harassment from users complaining about abandoned support. Even then, I don't want to give them praise until the update actually exists.
Reference 1: http://blog.gethuawei.com/huawei-device-usa-update...
Despoiler - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Huawei has been caught numerous times straight up stealing other company's intellectual property. They deployed an exact copy errata and all of Cisco's IOS in their routers. They are in a lawsuit with T-Mobile for corporate espionage. They also got caught siphoning non-anonymous user data from their cell phones and then they lied about doing it. Huawei is a government sponsored corporation and the Chinese government uses it to do whatever they want. I wouldn't anywhere near any Huawei product.pgari - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
The performance charts should have included the Nexus 6 and OnePlus One results, which have already been reviewed by Anandtechpichemanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Hi, just today I read another review and they didn't encounter any overheating nor did they have problems in low light photography. Also the autonomy was quite good (5h of gaming if I recall correctly)Is the terminal you reviewed on the latest firmware? Maybe a defective unit or another hw revision could explain this.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
It was on the a late October released firmware.I'm getting the same gaming battery life of 5h (5.6h!) as pointed out in the review, I don't think there's changes in that regard.
pichemanu - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
Sorry for the gaming autonomy number, I mistakenly remembered around 2h.