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
CPU Performance
Let's a better look at the Kirin 925's performance in terms CPU power. Again, this SoC is merely a slightly higher clocked Hi3630 as we've already benchmarked on the Huawei Honor 6. The basic hardware remains the same - a 1.8GHz quad A15 cluster with 2MB of L2 and a 1.3GHz quad A7 cluster with 512kB of L2 cache. The setup is running on an HMP (Heterogeneous Multi-Processing) hardware implementation running on a Linaro GTS (Global Task Scheduling) software stack on the Linux kernel. Memory is provided by 2GB of LPDDR3-1600 memory in this unit, with a higher 3GB variant available.
First, we take a look at our browser suites, testing general Javascript performance inside Chrome.
As expected, the Mate 7 doesn't differ too much from the Honor 6. The slight 100MHz boost on the A15 cluster brings it a few slight percentages above the Kirin 920. Again we see the big.LITTLE configuration and the A15 in general being extremely well-performing in these tests, being at the forefront of Android performance and only being beaten by Apple's own chip architectures. It's safe to say that the CPU has no issues at all in delivering an excellent and fast web-browsing experience.
WebXPRT has behaved weirdly on the Mate 7, it consistently scores less than the Honor 6 even although they employ the same chip. I'm not too sure as why this happened. My assumption is that there might be some software regressions in Huawei's OS libraries, but it's weird to see WebXPRT being the sole test unit to suffer from this effect. Because the CPU is running at a higher clock and voltage, we might be seeing some problem with throttling as WebXPRT tends to run much longer than the previous benchmarks.
Let's continue on with BaseMark OS II, a benchmark which tries to measure several aspects of a system.
The System and Web tests in BaseMark are mainly CPU limited. We see a similar ordering as in the Javascript benchmarks, with the Kirin leading the Android devices behind Apple's iPhones.
The memory benchmark is performing very weakly here. As a reminder, BaseMark is also testing the NAND performance in the memory sub-test, and not the main memory.
Like on the Honor 6, the Mali is having big issues with BaseMark OS II's Graphics benchmark and ends up below even Qualcomm's last generation's GPU. This, in conjunction with the lower memory score brings the overall BaseMark score further down.
Again the Mate 7 performed worse than the Honor 6. We're starting to see a trend here where longer lasting performance tests perform worse on the Mate 7, again I suspect a throttling issue here. Before we dwell more deeply into that, let's revise the performance of the Mali T628MP4 again.
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GTRagnarok - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
The only interesting thing to me is the fingerprint scanner. Samsung should get rid of their heart-rate sensor and put one of these scanners in its place.DestroyThaNet - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Andrei, I've been experiencing a significant amount of light bleed whenever I use black backgrounds on my Ascend Mate 7. The problem is located on the left side where the SIM and microSD are located. Have you noticed any similar issues?Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
My unit sports virtually no light bleed - the least I've seen on any LCD screen and why I was also impressed with the blacks of this IPS-Neo screen.DestroyThaNet - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Hmmm…I received another one in the mail today. Both have pretty bad light bleed problems. I'm thinking it's a manufacturing or design problem that happens often. Here they are next to an iPhone showing the same black wallpaper.http://i61.tinypic.com/2jb1729.jpg
http://i61.tinypic.com/imv51y.jpg
http://i60.tinypic.com/142603k.jpg
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Wow that looks bad. My unit is uniformely dark. This unit was handed out by Huawei at the official release so it might not be a representation of full production models.DestroyThaNet - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Dang, how disappointing. Thanks for your input, Andrei.Ethos Evoss - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
hey man which pone u won ?? i bet iphone :DDDzodiacfml - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Terrible especially considering the cosst of this thing.johnny_boy - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
The Honor 6 is better if you don't need a huge screen and don't mind the plastic housing at significantly cheaper pricing. In my 3 weeks experience with the Honor 6, I too haven't noticed any oerformance issues with flash memory performance. But I still wish they would use some slightly higher quality stuff. Since I don't game, this phone has performed like a beast. 3GB RAM is definitely a new minimum for me, especially as a Firefox with adblock user.sandman74 - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
I would never trust this brand. Too closely aligned with the Chinese government .. and whilst China may be "the factories of the world", I can't help but think of China as a stealthy enemy of the state hell bent on taking over the world !As for the phone .. It's a piece of over priced junk with the odd glimmer of innovative software and I think your review concludes that. But sadly they , along with other low price China brands are going to shift millions of android phones due to low prices which even Samsung can't compete with.
Hopefully the more people become aware of their phones being junk tech, the less they will sell... in any country.