The Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge Review
by Joshua Ho on April 17, 2015 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Galaxy S6
- Galaxy S6 Edge
System Performance
In order to test the Exynos 7420 and the phone in general, we turn to our suite of benchmarks which are able to show how the device performs in common general computing workloads. Something as simple as web browsing is still surprisingly intensive on mobile phones, and in general Android can often be quite stressful to run in the constraints of a ~3W total TDP especially on any phone still running Dalvik due to its strong reliance on bytecode and a virtual machine that translates bytecode to machine code just before and during application runtime. ART improves this significantly, but is limited in the nature of optimization as AOT compilation optimizations are limited by the CPU power of the SoC and the need to compile the application in a reasonable amount of time.
As always, we'll start things off with our browser benchmarks. After getting to use the phone, it became clear to me that Chrome is poorly optimized against the Galaxy S6 as Samsung’s browser is clearly superior in performance. For that reason I've gone ahead and run our benchmarks on both Chrome and on the stock browser, as seen below.
Needless to say, in order to see the full potential of the Exynos 7420 and its cluster of A57s, it’s necessary to use Samsung’s stock browser. This performance is really quite amazing when compared to Apple’s A8X, which has basically been the gold standard for performance in the mobile space in the context of ARM SoCs.
Moving on, as a part of our updates to the benchmark suite for 2015, we'll take a look at Basemark OS II 2.0, which should give a better picture of CPU performance in addition to overall device performance.
The browser benchmarks seem to hide some pretty enormous variability as the Galaxy S 6 edge (which is comparable to the Galaxy S 6) sets a new record among Android devices. The only challenger is the iPad Air 2, which uses the A8X SoC with three Enhanced Cyclone cores and the semi-custom GXA6850 GPU.
This system test contains a floating point and integer test, in addition XML parsing, which means that this test mostly stresses CPU and RAM. Interestingly enough, the Exynos 7420 pulls far ahead of both the Exynos 5433 and Snapdragon 810 in this test, and approaches the A8X. The difference between the 5433 and 7420 is likely a combination of the higher clocks on both the A57 and A53 clusters for the 7420 (1.9/1.3 on the 5433, 2.1/1.5 on the 7420), in addition to the ability to stay at a high 'overdrive' clock due to reduced leakage from the 14LPE process. The One M9 likely falls a bit short here due to HTC's governor settings restricting the use of all 8 cores simultaneously.
While one might guess that the memory test of 'Basemark OS II 2.0 - Memory' is of RAM, this is actually a test of the internal storage. Once again we see the S6 edge come close to leading the pack due to the use of the new UFS (Universal Flash Storage) standard. Casual examination reveals that the S6 edge has a queue depth of 16, and that it identifies itself with the rather cryptic model name of KLUBG4G1BD-E0B1.
For the web test, it uses the built-in WebView rendering engine rather than Chrome and paints a distinctly different picture, especially because these tests are focused on HTML5 and CSS rather than JavaScript. Here we can see that the iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 continue to hold their lead, but the Galaxy S6 is pretty much the king of the hill when it comes to Android devices.
Our next system benchmark is PCMark, which does a number of basic benchmarks designed to stress various aspects of the device in everyday workloads like video playback, web browsing, text editing, and photo editing. This tends to test every aspect of a mobile device, unlike microbenchmarks that can often miss aspects of the system that can affect performance.
In these tests, the Galaxy S6 continues to perform strongly here due to the fast NAND storage solution and the Exynos 7420 SoC. As we have already covered the Basemark OS II 2.0 results in previous articles, I would refer back to it as those scores are final and have already been contextualized.
Overall, in these general purpose computing tasks that stress CPU, memory, and NAND performance we can see that the Exynos 7420 is off to a flying start. Samsung Mobile should focus more strongly on optimizing the software stack against Chrome as mobile Chrome has around twice the user share of stock Android browsers. I often say that the SoC is the foundation to a good smartphone, and in the case of the Galaxy S6 it feels like this is especially true.
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Margalus - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
It's not "without" a warrant. Read what the op said and what I responded to. A judge legally subpoenaed the information and that person wants to hide it from the courts. Big difference from just grabbing your phone and getting the information without a subpoena.Buk Lau - Saturday, April 18, 2015 - link
Warrants and subpoenas are both writs, which the court issues with legally justified reasons. In essence they are the same thing, so unless you are actually engaged in illegal activities I see no reason to be scared that your fingerprint can get subpoenaed LOLFlushedBubblyJock - Friday, April 24, 2015 - link
you mean the court issues with any lies and excuses they so desire, including those far outside the spirit and letter of the lawthat's current reality sheepy
akdj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
That's paranoid backwoods Idaho shit bub. Nothing to do with 'reality'LordConrad - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
Lawyers and Doctors are examples of people with legal and sensitive information. Also corporations worried about corporate espionage. That's just off the top of my head, I'm guessing you didn't think before responding.Also, just because the average person has nothing to hide does not mean they should lose their right to protect their data.
Margalus - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
I thought before responding. The key thing here is that a court issues a legal subpoena for the information. You are talking about hiding information from a judge that has legally subpoenaed the information. Unless what you are doing is illegal, there is no need to have to hide it from the court that legally subpoena's the information. And in fact you would be breaking more laws by trying to subvert a legal subpoenaNow if you are a child rapist that records what you do on your phone, I could understand about being worried about "legal" subpoenas.
LordConrad - Saturday, April 18, 2015 - link
You aren't subverting anything if you use a pattern or password lock, because knowledge CAN'T be subpoenaed as it's protected by the fifth amendment. Also, how many times have police agencies obtained information without due process? Good attorneys can usually get such information thrown out, but not always.akdj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
You're in luck. In order TO USE the fingerprint system, one must 'choose a password, pattern ...' (Possibly tgird choice, can't remember not gonna look) as a backup. So you're both gonna be alright. Just quit with the paranoia. Judges, lawyers and doctors don't have things to hide in their cell phones, anymore than a CEO of a corporation or Jony Ive that a court's going to subpoena its contents without damn good reason.Let's see how far ol Tom Brady wants to 'appeal' this decision. After talking to Goddell, if the suspension is upheld, Tom won't be able to hide, dispose of or erase the contents of his cell phone, iPad or computer ...however he communicated with 'the deflator' -- the court can absolutely then subpoena his phone, as well as the ball boys' phones. They should be worried. If you should, maybe you should check yourself.
It's like the paranoia of cloud storage, using Google or allowing 'Pop Ups'. It's irrelevant what you're doing to 'hide'. You can't. If you're online, everything you do is forever embedded somewhere, in some server, and won't go away.
Like BubblyJack below me (jocks don't spend all day bagging on Apple when no one else has mentioned them) -- digital paranoia is silly, unless you're doing something illegal and IMHO, if you are and these tools catch you, AWESOME, more power to the 'tools, capturing digital thieves, identity thieves and phishing antagonists, child porn traders and drug sales sites like the Silk World Take down recently, torrenting sites stealing music and TV or movies --- they're all bad, they all suck, and they should be exsposed
** I'm in no way endorsing government censorship or web oversite, including the ability to gamble, watch porn ( of age ) --- even buy weird, niché stuff, but breaking the law is braking the law, and we've got internationally recognized 'law' and morales that I'm absolutely for 'governing' online. It would really suck if the 'net was somehow broken because of the 1%'ers, and not holding back your information can't 'teach' systems like Google more than they can hurt us when it comes down to it **
akdj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Last line was supposed to be allowing our information to Google CAN teach the 'systems' and in turn, Us more about ourselves. Interests. Health. Shopping deals and aggregation of our own data, pictures, media collections and management. If we allow it to, we're just a number in a pot of hundreds of millions.FlushedBubblyJock - Friday, April 24, 2015 - link
lordconrad, the sheep have been trained, expect no enlightenment, no western standards, and no cluethus we have the current situation, all the data is mined and bluffdale is packed to the gills
the retards won't believe no matter how many times they are informed and it is proven to them, and their pat answer is : what does it matter anyway!!??!! ( only a criminal would care )
so I'm not certain how eggheads have become glorious useful idiots, other than the wool is so thick there's no meat on them bones, and the shrunken brain has crumbled to coddled dust