The Google Nexus 9 Review
by Joshua Ho & Ryan Smith on February 4, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- HTC
- Project Denver
- Android
- Mobile
- NVIDIA
- Nexus 9
- Lollipop
- Android 5.0
GPU Performance
While Denver is new, the Kepler GPU in the Tegra K1 is mostly a known quantity by now. In the Nexus 9, the GPU is still a single SMX clocked to 852 MHz. In order to verify performance, we turn to our standard test suite. For the most part, our GPU-bound tests are meant to represent gaming performance although tests like 3DMark can have CPU-bound aspects while GFXBench tends towards being a pure GPU test.
The Nexus 9's GPU has effectively identical performance to what we saw in the SHIELD Tablet, which means that the Nexus 9 should be able to support a broad range of games without performance issues. There is a bit of a noticeable performance delta when comparing on-screen performance, but this is simply due to the higher resolution of the Nexus 9's display. The one notable exception is the 3DMark physics test, which seems to scale with core count quite well, and that causes Denver to fall slightly short of the quad A15 configuration.
NAND Performance
While storage performance can often be secondary to a smooth user experience, poor storage performance is extremely painful. This is similar to RAM, where the difference between 2 and 3 GB is generally academic, while the difference between 512MB and 1 GB is enormous. While there have been some issues with Androbench with the move to Android 5.0, it seems that the timer issues have since been resolved, so it's possible to resume using the results from Androbench to get a rough idea of NAND performance.
Here the Nexus 9 doesn't suffer nearly as much from full disk encryption that is forcibly enabled on the device; performance is noticeably higher than what we see in the Nexus 6. This seems to lend some credence to the theory that CPUs with ARM v8 ISA would be better suited to handling the need to encrypt and decrypt storage in real time. I tested the Nexus 9 with a custom kernel without full disk encryption to see how Androbench scores might change, but this didn't have a noticeable impact which seems to back this theory, although I'm still not confident that FDE is a good idea to enforce across all new devices.
The NAND itself, a Samsung eMMC package designated by the name BWBC3R, seems to be quite performant outside of pure sequential access, which seems to suggest that HTC hasn't skimped out in this area at all, and the use of F2FS is responsible for some of the best random I/O scores in any mobile devices we've tested thus far.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
169 Comments
View All Comments
PC Perv - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
It is clear, even though you did not say, why no one other than NV and Google will use Denver in their products. Thank you for the coherent review, Ryan.P.S. I can't wait for the day SunSpider, Basemark, and WebXPRT disappear from your benchmark suit.
jjj - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
You always make those kind of claims about dual core vs more cores but you have never attempted to back them up with real world perf and power testing.In real use there are alerts and chats and maybe music playing and so on. While your hypothesis could be valid or partially valid you absolutely need to first verify it before heavily insisting on it and accepting it as true. Subjective conclusions are just not your style is it, you test things to get to objective results.
And it wold be easy you already have "clean"numbers and you would just need to run the same benchmarks for perf and power with some simulated background activity to be able to compare the differences in gains/loses.
PC Perv - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Where would you put the performance of "backup" ARM-only part of Denver? Cortex-A7? Is it measurable at all?Also, why don't Samsung use F2FS for their devices? I thought it was developed by them.
abufrejoval - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
While the principal designer seems to be a Korean, I'm not sure he works for Samsung, who typically used Yet Another Flash File System (YAFFS).Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
It's not measurable in a traditional sense, as the DCO will kick in at some point. However I'd say it's somewhere along the lines of A53, though overall a bit better.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The design philosophy of the DCO does make a lot of sense. When your mobile device starts to bog down and you start cursing at it, what is it usually doing? It is usually looping or iterating through something. The DCO wont help with small blocks of code that execute in 500uS, but you dont need help with that sort of code anyway. What you want to improve is exactly the type of code the DCO can improve: the kind of code that takes several dozen milliseconds (or more) to execute. That is when you begin to notice the lag in your cpu.mpokwsths - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Joshua & Ryan,please update the charts with the bench results of the newer version of Androbench 4: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com....
(I had previously commented on the fact that you can't safely compare the i/o results of different OS AND different bench apps).
Androbench 4 is redesigned it to use multiple i/o threads (as a proper i/o bench app should have) and produces vastly improved results on both Lollipop and earlier Android devices.
You will not be able to compare the newer results with older ones, but at least it will put an end to this ridiculus ι/ο performance difference between iOS and Android, the one you persistently -but falsly- keep projecting.
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I tested this out on several of my devices and could see only minor improvements, all within 10%. The performance difference to iOS devices does not seem to be a dupe at all.mpokwsths - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
My results strongly disagree with you:Nexus 5: Seq Write: 19MB/s --> 55 MB/s
Rand Write: 0.9 --> 2.9 MB/s
Sony Z3 Tablet: Seq Write: 21 MB/s --> 53 MB/s
Rand Write: 1,6 MB/s --> 8MB/s
Seq Read: 135 MB/s --> 200MB/s
I can upload pics showing my findings.
mpokwsths - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Meet the fastest Nexus 5 in the world:https://www.dropbox.com/s/zkhn073xy8l28ry/Screensh...;)