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
NAND Performance: The First UFS Phone
Storage performance is often a critical area for user performance, as applications cannot be cached in RAM at every possible moment. Camera performance is also often limited by storage performance as RAM buffers can only do so much to maintain performance before it’s necessary to commit photos to non-volatile storage.
However due to the memory hierarchy to some extent, storage performance is often hard to notice once it’s at a point where things are “good enough”. Unfortunately, in some cases we can see OEMs failing to include sufficiently performant solid-state storage, which can be a major pain point in the user experience when random read/write performance is low enough that there are noticeable IO pauses as the system has to wait for data to be loaded from storage.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 family is the first shipping implementation of UFS (Universal Flash Storage) 2.0 standard, which makes the internal storage model less like an SD card in nature. When comparing the eMMC 5.1 standard to the UFS 2.0 standard, we see a move from a the 400 MB/s maximum of the eMMC 5.1 standard with HS400 physical link interface to MIPI M-PHY, which allows for a theoretical maximum of around 720 MB/s and should be more efficient in transmitting data than the current eMMC standard. In addition, UFS makes it possible to do full duplex communication, which means that reads and writes can happen simultaneously. There's also a command queue, which helps to avoid inefficiencies that could arise from waiting for commands once a command has been processed by the storage controller, and utilizes the SCSI protocol to facilitate these new features at the interface level.
As for the Galaxy S6 itself, the UFS implementation Samsung is using is Samsung developed. Samsung's current implementation only supports up to 300 MB/s (or 2.4 Gbps) transfer rates as a theoretical maximum, so from an interface perspective it's still not reaching the full capabilities of the standard. Though even at a cap of 300MB/sec, it still stands to be a significant improvement over typical eMMC solutions.
Finally, on a technical note, the 32GB models are of the model KLUBG4G1BD-E0B1 with a maximum queue depth of 16.
In order to test storage performance, we use Androbench with some custom settings to get a reasonable idea of performance in this area, although this test isn’t an exhaustive examination of storage performance by any means.
The Galaxy S6 performs rather impressively in our standard storage test, but not as fast as one might have hoped. This is due to the nature of the Androbench 3.6 test, which only tests a single IO thread, which won’t use the UFS storage of the Galaxy S6 to its full extent. In order to see the kind of difference that UFS really makes, I ran the same test again on Androbench 4.x, which does support multiple IO threads. However, as our iOS storage test and Androbench 3.6 don’t support more than a single IO thread we will continue to present both results for now.
Overall, there are some immense benefits in storage performance here, especially in random IO performance. The Galaxy S6 has some of the fastest storage available in a phone today as far as I can tell given that this is basically a pure MLC solution, and shouldn’t have any real issue with storage performance holding back the rest of the phone over the course of 1-3 years as long as a reasonable amount of free space is kept to allow efficient storage management.
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nerd1 - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
Glad that anandtech FINALLY included the browser benchmarks using sammy's stock browser.lilmoe - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
It's an improvement. But still, "browser benchmarks" are just that; a benchmark to software side of the browser engine. It's only good for testing CPU performance when we're ONLY looking at generation improvements of the *same* platform/browser/OS.I wish we had a more "open"/transparent cross platform benchmarking suite... Anyway, it looks Exynos is truly back as a market leader, as in being a generation above everything else. I'd expect it to stay in lead well till the Note 5 is here.
nerd1 - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
"Although the dynamic range of the Galaxy S6’s IMX240 sensor is inherently lower than an equivalent 1.5 micron pixel-size sensor due to the nature of CMOS image sensors"This is not true. Pixel size rarely affects daylight dynamic range of the sensor. D800 series (36MP FF sensor) has actually tiny bit wider dynamic range than 12MP FF sensor of A7s.
Alien959 - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
Yes, that's true for dslr's because they still have large enough pixel size so dynamic range isn't affected. Even d800 have many times larger pixel photo sensor than 1.5 micron used in SG6. For bigger densities in smaller sensors dynamic range is lower compare some high end compact like panasonic LX7 and cheap point and shoot.nerd1 - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
Various review sites direct comparison between phone cameras and Note 4/GS6 actually had LESS highlight clipping than iPhone 6.Alien959 - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
Yes, I have read some of the so maybe sony definitely improved the sensor so samsung is using that versus their own. Different generation sensor and processing also affect the final image.Hairs_ - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
It's a very hindsight-heavy negative view of the s5 in this review. I'm surprised sales weren't great for it as it fixed most of the issues with the s4's performance and camera.Losing waterproofing, removable battery and SD card are killers for me but apart from that I don't see what makes the s6 a brilliant. The improved software performance will hopefully be brought down to older devices, the improvements in SOC design and battery efficiency are offset by the pointless resolution increase, and the mantra "must follow apple's cue to be considered premium" isn't convincing.
Switching to white backgrounds for apps wastes the advantage of AMOLED as well.
Still, it's selling well so I doubt Samsung care.
lilmoe - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
The GS5 didn't sell well because of "perception", not merit. It was a HUGE upgrade over the GS4 in almost every aspect IMHO. I'm one of those who actually liked the "band-aid" plastic back. I would have preferred if Samsung made the GS6 closer to the Alpha's design; metal frame with plastic back, but less squarish (IE: the same exact shape/corners of the GS6 but with the same plastic back as the Alpha).I believe that Samsung nailed the design with the Alpha and Note 4, but it seems that reviewers and consumers didn't agree. That stupid twisting of the back cover by reviewers to prove that it was "flimsy" only proved that they were completely ignorant of the quality of materials and the functionality/practicality it entails.
Ammaross - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
Yep. It's the reviewers that forced Samsung's hand into copying the metal+glass design that the iPhone has. Personally, I think it's horrible as the S6's glass back makes it far too slippery in-hand. I'm definitely putting a bumper on it just so I can hold on to it (which of course entirely defeats the metal+glass design anyway!). Plastic does not mean "cheap," merely flexible (in application/texture, not just robustness).FlushedBubblyJock - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
Well, yes, I agree, the reviewers had nothing but disdain if it wasn't "the solid and simple apple industrial design that feels expensive in my hand" but add in the drooling sheep and parrots in their responses, they certainly totally contributed as well.Since these people function on mindless perception, not facts, we have the cloned result.