The Samsung Galaxy S7 & S7 Edge Review, Part 1
by Joshua Ho on March 8, 2016 9:00 AM ESTSoC Performance
While we’re ready to move on to newer benchmarks for 2016, our system performance benchmarks from 2015 are still going to provide a pretty good idea for what to expect from the Galaxy S7 and Snapdragon 820 by extension. For those that are unfamiliar with what the Snapdragon 820 is, I’d reference our previous articles on the Snapdragon 820.
In essence, we’re looking at a 2x2 CPU configuration with 2.15 GHz Kryo cores for the performance cluster, and 1.6 GHz Kryo cores for the efficiency cluster. Binding the two clusters together are some power aware scheduling at the kernel level and a custom interconnect to handle coherency between the two clusters. Memory is also improved relative to the Snapdragon 810, with a bump to LPDDR4-1866 over the former's LPDDR4-1600. Of course, there's a lot more to talk about here, but for now we can simply look at how the Snapdragon 820 compares in our benchmarks.
Update: As we've had a few questions on the subject, I just want to clarify browser testing. Samsung's stock browser was not included with our Verizon-branded sample phone, nor is it possible to install it at this time. As a result we are unable to test the performance of Samsung's browser. The Verge reports that this is a Verizon decision and that all Verizon phones will be shipping like this; so for these phones Chrome is the de-facto stock browser.
Starting off with our web benchmarks, we can see that in the time since our initial testing of the Snapdragon 820 MDP there have been some major improvements to how well Chrome is optimized for Kryo. As a result we're seeing results that are almost comparable to Snapdragon Browser in Chrome.
Overall then the Galaxy S7 and its Snapdragon 820 SoC won't top the charts on web benchmarks - Apple still holds an edge here - however the Galaxy S7 puts up a solid fight. The one drawback here is that the Mate 8 and its Cortex A72 CPU seems to have the edge over the Galaxy S7.
In Basemark OS II the combination of a better GPU, better NAND, and better single thread CPU performance seems to be enough for the Galaxy S7 to approach the iPhone 6s Plus in overall performance. While the system benchmark shows that Kryo isn't quite going toe to toe with Twister, the Adreno 530 helps to narrow the gap in the graphics test.
In PCMark, we can see that the Galaxy S7 is mostly comparable to the Galaxy S6. However major improvements in areas like GPU performance help to give it an overall advantage relative to the Galaxy S6 in the photo editing test. Given that this is basically a test of API-level performance, it's likely that Samsung's frameworks and governor settings lead to mostly similar performance in these tests.
Overall, the Snapdragon 820 appears to provide a pretty healthy bump in performance over almost every SoC seen in 2015, although it's hard to declare a clear winner when comparing it to Apple's A9 or Huawei's Kirin 950. If you glanced at the battery life graphs and the performance graphs above it's pretty obvious that Qualcomm has made some enormous strides here. While not quite going from zero to hero, Qualcomm has come close, and that definitely deserves some credit.
NAND Performance
If you think about the memory hierarchy, while RAM and cache are important, at the end of the day the most important aspect is the base storage. Even if you have infinite RAM and cache, if your storage is sufficiently slow the user experience is going to be painful for at least the first time you have to load something.
In order to test this, we use our standard test of AndroBench with 4 KB and 256 KB reads and writes for random and sequential tests. I went ahead and did some digging around to figure out exactly what it is we’re testing in the Galaxy S7, and it turns out that while the Galaxy S7 storage solution is similar to what’s in the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, it isn’t quite the same. The Galaxy S7 UFS storage identifies itself as the KLUBG4G1CE-B0B1, which looks to be in the same family and appears to have been released at pretty much the same time as the Galaxy S6 storage solution, but the model number isn’t quite the same.
Looking at the performance results, we can also see that the Galaxy S7 is pretty similar to the Galaxy S6 in storage performance at a high level. Interestingly enough despite using full disk encryption on the Galaxy S7, we don’t really see a noticeable degradation in performance relative to the Galaxy S6 which is good to see considering the number of Android devices that do have noticeable performance effects when enabling FDE.
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TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, March 9, 2016 - link
It will let us know if throttling is a big issue. Benchmarks are just that, tests to see how well the phone does.Of course we dont run benches all day, but if you do not run benches, then how do you know how well the phone does when pushed, in say, a mobile game like asphalt 8 for more than 5 minutes? It's useful information to have.
tuxRoller - Saturday, March 12, 2016 - link
Well then, according to that measure, throttling is a big issue with the iPhone 6s.How do you tell how well it works with asphalt 8? I'd probably pay asphalt 8 for awhile.
These benchmarks aren't a good proxy as they are designed to push the devices to their limits.
tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Also, XDA ran some graphics tests continuously if you're interested.All of the phones throttled, save the note 5.
frenchy_2001 - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
here is the xda article:http://www.xda-developers.com/s7-edge-throttling-t...
Note that the note5 did not throttle in GPU test, but its final run was still only 60% of the throttled S7 score (and about 50% of the starting score).
tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
I just mentioned that it didn't throttle since jjj seems to be an exynos fan, so I was trying to forestall "BUT THE EXYNOS DIDN'T THROTTLE", even though it had lower results throughout.gijames1225 - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Great write up. Glad to see the Snapdragon 820 is properly flagship level. I look forward to the rest of the review, details on throttling, and hopefully at some point a look at Samsungs new Exynos SoC in the other s7 model.Drumsticks - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
It's kind of interesting that Apple has a solid win in CU performance against Qualcomm, but a loss in GPU, even though they get their GPU from a company who should specialize in them. Twister truly is an astounding architecture, but they're probably at the end of the easy, huge performance boosts. It may be interesting to see how well Apple can go about completely redesigning their core when it happens.name99 - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Faster GPU is not as interesting as faster CPU because it's trivial to make a faster GPU --- just throw more GPU "cores" at the problem. If Apple wanted to double the GPU performance of the A9 tomorrow, all they have to do is use 12 GT7000 cores instead of their current 6.So the decision as to how many to use is an economic/use case decision, not a technical one. Given the pixels Apple is interested in driving, it looks like they used the right number of cores. QC sells into a broader market (and, in particular, a market that, whether or not it makes sense, uses crazy-high pixel densities) so their incentives align with throwing in more cores.
If you want to run a technically interesting GPU performance competition between Apple and Adreno (or Mali, or anyone else), raw performance is not the interesting metric. The interesting metrics are
- performance/watt
- performance/mm^2
I don't know who would win either of these, but my guess is Apple. We don't yet have enough information to answer the first question, but the mutterings about GPU throttling in the comments suggest that QC gets hig GPU numbers by burning lotsa power, not by having some super-advanced GPU that's a cleverer design than anyone else. In a sense, what you're seeing is what Apple could copy if they wanted by putting the A9X inside the iPhone6S.
lilmoe - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
" The interesting metrics are- performance/watt
- performance/mm^2"
Nah, the really interesting metric would be how much power consumes to run (and sustain) the average game at 60FPS at the same resolution. Read: efficiency.
sor - Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - link
Efficiency... So performance/watt.