Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) Review
by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on October 1, 2013 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Galaxy Note 10.1
GPU & Performance
Although Exynos 5420 fixes the big underlying issue with Samsung’s silicon on the CPU front, it’s actually the GPU that sees the most dramatic change. ARM once again wins Samsung’s GPU business and equipped the Exynos 5420 with a 6-core Mali-T628, replacing the PowerVR SGX544MP3 from the previous Exynos 5410. Overall performance takes a huge step forward. Looking at T-Rex HD (offscreen) we see the best example of where the Mali-T628MP6 lands: about 11% slower than Adreno 330 and 8% behind IMG’s PowerVR G6430 in the iPhone 5s. It’s definitely a competitive GPU with the latest and greatest from IMG and Qualcomm, but not faster than either. It’s incredible to think of just how far we’ve come. It wasn’t too long ago that we were complaining about non-Apple SoCs not taking GPU performance seriously, but here we are talking about competitive performance across the big three ARM vendors.
NAND Performance
We've been tracking storage performance on these devices for a little while now and have noticed forward progress over the generations. The new Note 10.1 does reasonably well in our IO tests, with its strengths being sequential read and random write performance (arguably the two more important metrics). Since the tablet ships with Android 4.3 it should feature FSTRIM support (something we're still verifying on the 2014 Edition), which will help keep NAND performance high as long as you don't fill up all of your storage (remember: try to keep ~20% of the internal NAND free at all times).
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Yep, I believe so (need to confirm with Brian since I don't have the device in front of me) - all modern non GPe Samsung devices (as well as those from other OEMs) do the same manual DVFS setting upon benchmark detect unfortunately.Squuiid - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Anand, I do hope you'll consider flagging this issue more prominently. You obviously have your reasons for not calling out Samsung explicitly, so instead include the other cheaters in your expose, be it Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, HTC, along with Samsung.Sarav - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Hey guys, was wondering how good the screen on the Note 10.1 is in terms of colour reproduction compared to the Nexus 10?bleh0 - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Is there a baytrail tablet with digitizer support? I was thinking about the surface pro 2 but that is out of my price range and while the note 10.1 does seem decent the programs that I use just aren't available on android.nerd1 - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
One japanese tablet has 2560*1440 display, wacom and waterproofness. :DTheEvilBlight - Sunday, October 6, 2013 - link
Which tablet would that be?darkich - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Anand, why didn't you point out that this very SoC will get the likely software update for enabling the simultaneus octa-core operation, hence probably a pretty dramatic improvement in both efficiency and compute?abazigal - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link
Because, like you said, it will "likely" get the update.Taracta - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Being that this is a pentile display with pseudo square pixels I would put the DPI/PPI at ~232 when compared to an actual RGB display of the same resolution and size which would have ~299 DPI/PPI. So how much of a difference does the Nexus 10 display and this have in rendering graphics, text, etc.? This is what I would like to know, especially as these are larger displays compared to the smartphones.name99 - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
"The latest iteration of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1, aptly named the 2014 Edition"So Samsung copies Apple yet again! :-)
(For those who don't understand the joke:
http://support.apple.com/specs/
Note how pretty much every item has a name and year number...)