The Samsung Galaxy Note7 (S820) Review
by Joshua Ho on August 16, 2016 9:00 AM ESTSystem Performance Cont'd
Now that we've covered more general purpose benchmarks that tend to emphasize CPU performance and GPU compute performance, we can look at benchmarks that tend to more strongly emphasize things that games will see benefits from such as improved GPU graphics performance and improved CPU physics processing performance.
It's probably no surprise, but the Galaxy Note7 performs as expected with the latest drivers and in ideal thermal conditions. The Adreno 530 should be more than sufficient for the forseeable future but for maximum performance it's best to enable 1080p rendering or lower to maximize frame rates in games like Real Racing 3 that tend to really use the GPU to its fullest extent.
NAND Performance
Of course, while Discomark provides a sort of holistic view of performance for a specific task, it’s also important to at least try and break down the various aspects that impact system performance so rather than simple black box testing we can further understand what factors influence performance and therefore provide additional information to make better buying decisions. One of the major contributors to general purpose performance is going to be storage performance, which is often something often ignored by marketing as the nitty gritty details of NAND storage realistically require some background in solid state physics and devices to understand, as well as some understanding of computer science and engineering.
While I’m not really happy with the state of our mobile storage benchmarks, for now I don’t really see another option here as the publicly available storage benchmarks for Android and iOS are fairly basic. Putting aside the state of the benchmarking industry, our current benchmark remains AndroBench 4 which provides at least some basic storage benchmarking capabilities. We use custom settings with this benchmark which attempts to make the test more realistic as the default settings are just wildly unrealistic. This includes adjusting the buffer size, increasing the file size to 100 MB, and only using one thread instead of 8. 256KB file size is targeted as this is the most common block size if you profile this kind of thing for sequential writes and reads, while 4KB block sizes are the most common for other tasks as the vast majority of computer architectures use 4KB pages for virtual memory. Single-threaded I/O is common in most cases because multi-threaded programming is still difficult for most people to reason about in an effective manner because conscious thought is inherently serial in nature with some multiplexing. In addition to this, many eMMC solutions on the market don’t really perform well with multiple threads simultaneously as the controller can’t do anything with extra requests other than reply with a busy signal which already happens with a single thread.
Putting aside discussions of testing we can take a look at the storage solution used in the Galaxy Note7 before getting into the actual results. The Note7 continues to use basically the same storage solution as the Galaxy S7 and S6, which is to say an MLC-based solution that has a UFS Gear 3 single lane interface for bandwidth up to 600 MB/s and basically has the exact same model number if you check the SCSI devices attached to the system save for some changes that indicate the higher 64GB storage relative to the 32GB chips that are most common in the Galaxy S7.
Looking at the test results it performs exactly as quickly as you’d expect from this MLC solution as we’ve tested it in the Galaxy S6, S6 edge, S6 edge+, Note5, S7, S7 edge, and now the Note7 as well as the LG G5. The performance here is acceptable but obviously if you look at burst performance the iPhone 6s has a faster solution due to the hybrid SLC/TLC storage solution. The main benefit of pure MLC NAND is that performance is more consistent as there’s no precipitous drop when the SLC buffer fills. There’s always room to improve but I don’t really see how it’s going to happen unless Samsung moves to V-NAND for the next generation.
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slyronit - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
Silly question, why do we do Pentile AMOLED displays? Wouldn't an SRGB AMOLED display allow us to use a lower resolution panel, which will save the GPU a lot of processing and hence power consumption and battery life?Is this just an excuse to use 1440p as a marketing gimmick? AMOLED SRGB displays are definitely feasible (My Nokia E7-00 had it 7 years ago).
iRoNeTiK - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
I'm wondering the difference between your 2016 vs 2015 battery benchmarks. I see that in your LG G4 review you were using the "2015" benchmarks and LG G4 got 11.37 hours of battery life for Web Browsing over WiFi but in this, it only gets 6.53. Very significant decrease. This is just one phone for example.Why would there be a need to change the benchmarks? Were the 2015 test not accurate? By that much? 11.37 to 6.53? Almost half, geez! Any clarification would be appreciated, thanks!
n13L5 - Thursday, August 25, 2016 - link
That bendy glass is just a way to get the corners scratched and well, a matter of taste, I guess. I'd rather do without, I already touch the edges of the screen accidentally when handling the phone sometimes, with usually annoying results.But ok, the rest of the phone is pretty splendid and I was tempted to overlook that -
Until I found out the dual-SIM solution is a "hybrid" solution, requiring removal of your MicroSD card to put a second SIM card in. I guess I wait for Sony's next entry with their splendid noise cancelling, which I've always enjoyed on airplanes...
Bfree4me - Friday, August 26, 2016 - link
Note 5 Owner here and for a while, because of the retail price of the Note 7. But the reviewer was clearly not feeling the Note and it's his opinion. But I have read countless reviews here and each and everytime Samsung was scrutinized for something. Plastic /Polymer Body, Screen Fit and Finish, overall Size etcetera. Now you guys err guy, has a gripe about the 3D glass sandwiching the aluminum as needed to be overhauled on the next generation. Ahem, this piece of KIT rivals anything on the market right now with exception being the S7. No one has a Water Resistant Unit period point blank! And the SPen is not for everyone, but I use my S-Pen each and every day, as a matter of fact several times a day to cut and paste captions. Yesh, a simple screen capture simply cannot compare to its precision. Samsung can do anything you've mentioned, but there is always a cost benefit associated with said options. Here's it from the head Engineering guy, http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/1/12340294/samsung-...Kind regards
ithehappy - Friday, August 26, 2016 - link
Sad to see the review only for SD variant, which will be release in two countries only, but whatever. That line there, where its mentioned that scrolling is still not as smooth as expected, how devices like HTC 10 has constant near 60 fps output when it needs come, makes me to not buy this phone. I just don't know what is wrong with Samsung, that they keep their nuisance TouchWiz, and just have no interest to make it smoother and more polished. If you can't do just switch to AOSP, what's the big deal! S Note and all the other Samsung apps could work without heavily modifying the framework right? Darn it Samsung! You choose loads of features over finesse, being a major manufacturer that's unwise, like you said, and I have been saying for as long as I could remember, moment most people start realising how poor TW is in comparison with vanilla Android, let's see where Samsung stock stands after that. Probably I will still end up buying it just because of its display, but that's not the point.Exynos review should be there though anyway, as that is the "international" variant, and arguably the better unit than SD.
Vagabondjonez - Saturday, August 27, 2016 - link
Htc 10 review...ideamotor - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
So .... call reception and volume? I've been through 3 Huawei Nexus 6Ps because everyone I talk to hears an echo, using two different cellular networks. Also, why don't you guys do reviews on DACs or at least point to a review?SanX - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
I immediately stop looking at any phone less then 6".lastunas - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
do you guys have charge time by 25w(12v/2.1a) wall charger?lastunas - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
do you guys have charge test by 25w(12v/2.1a) wall charger?