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
Exynos 7420: First 14nm Silicon In A Smartphone
This generation more than any generation in recent memory has been a time of significant movement in the SoC space. We were aware of the Exynos 7420 well before it was announced in the Galaxy S6, but for the most part I expected to see Snapdragon 810 in at least a few variants of the Galaxy S6. It was a bit surprising to see Samsung drop Snapdragon SoCs completely this generation, and judging by the battery life of the Galaxy S6 it seems that Samsung had their reasons for doing this.
For those that are unfamiliar with the Exynos 7420, this SoC effectively represents the culmination of their efforts in semiconductor manufacturing and integrated circuit design. On the foundry side, Samsung is leveraging their vertical integration to make the first SoC on their 14nm LPE (Low Power Early) process, which seems to be solely for Systems LSI until they can no longer use all production capacity.
We previously mentioned that Samsung’s 14nm process in general will lack any significant die shrink due to almost unchanged metal interconnect pitch, but this assumption was in comparison to their 20nm LPM process from which the 14nm LPE process borrows its BEOL (back end of line) from. Opposite to what we thought, the Exynos 5433 was manufacturered on a 20LPE process which makes use of a quite larger metal layer. The result is that one can see a significant die shrink for the 7420 as it is, according to Chipworks, only 78mm² and a 44% reduction over the Exynos 5433's 113mm². This is considerable even when factoring in that the new SoC had two added GPU shader cores. Beyond the swap from a LPDDR3 memory controller to a LPDDR4 capable one, the only other at first noticeable major functional overhaul on the SoC seems to be that the dedicated HEVC decoder block has been removed and HEVC encoding and decoding capability has been merged into Samsung's MFC (Multi-Function Codec) media hardware acceleration block.
Galaxy S6 PCB with SoC and modem in view (Source: Chipworks)
The move from a planar to FinFET process is crucial. Although this is covered in more detail in previous articles, the short explanation is that planar processes suffer from increasing power leakage at smaller process nodes as the bulk of the silicon becomes relatively more massive than the gate that controls the flow of current. This causes decreased power efficiency as the power source of the transistor starts to act as a gate itself. FinFET solves this problem by attempting to isolate the transistor from the bulk of the silicon wafer, wrapping the gate around the channel of the transistor to ensure that it retains strong control over the flow of current compared to a planar transistor design.
The effective voltage drop allowed by the process can be substantial. We can have a look at some voltage excerpts of common frequencies available on both the Exynos 5433 and 7420:
| Exynos 5433 vs Exynos 7420 Supply Voltages | ||||||
| Exynos 5433 | Exynos 7420 | Difference | ||||
| A57 1.9GHz (ASV2) | 1287.50mV | 1056.25mV | -234.25mV | |||
| A57 1.9GHz (ASV9) | 1200.00mV | 975.00mV | -225.00mV | |||
| A57 1.9GHz (ASV15) | 1125.00mV | 912.50mV | -212.50mV | |||
| A57 800MHz (ASV2) | 950.00mV | 768.75mV | -181.25mV | |||
| A57 800MHz (ASV9) | 900.00mV | 687.50mV | -224.50mV | |||
| A57 800MHz (ASV15) | 900.00mV | 625.00mV | -275.00mV | |||
| A53 1.3GHz (ASV2) | 1200.00mV | 1037.50mV | -162.50mV | |||
| A53 1.3GHz (ASV9) | 1112.50mV | 950.00mV | -162.50mV | |||
| A53 1.3GHz (ASV15) | 1062.50mV | 900.00mV | -162.50mV | |||
| A53 400MHz (ASV2) | 862.00mV | 743.75mV | -118.25mV | |||
| A53 400MHz (ASV9) | 787.50mV | 656.25mV | -131.25mV | |||
| A53 400MHz (ASV15) | 750.00mV | 606.25mV | -143.75mV | |||
| GPU 700MHz (ASV2) | 1125.00mV | 881.25mV | -243.75mV | |||
| GPU 700MHz (ASV9) | 1050.00mV | 800.00mV | -250.00mV | |||
| GPU 700MHz (ASV15) | 1012.50mV | 750.00mV | -262.50mV | |||
| GPU 266MHz (ASV2) | 875.00mV | 750.00mV | -125.00mV | |||
| GPU 266MHz (ASV9) | 800.00mV | 668.75mV | -131.25mV | |||
| GPU 266MHz (ASV15) | 762.50mV | 606.25mV | -156.25mV | |||
The ASV (Adaptive Scaling Voltage) numbers represent the different type of chip bins, a lower value representing a worse quality bin and a higher one a better quality one. Group 2 should be the lowest that is found in the wild, with group 15 representing the best possible bin and group 9 the median that should be found in most devices. As one can see in the table, we can achieve well up to -250mV voltage drop on some frequencies on the A57s and the GPU. As a reminder, power scales quadratically with voltage, so a drop from 1287.50mV to 1056.25mV as seen in the worst bin 1.9GHz A57 frequency should for example result in a considerable 33% drop in dynamic power. The Exynos 7420 uses this headroom to go slightly higher in clocks compared to the 5433 - but we expect the end power to still be quite lower than what we've seen on the Note 4.
On the design side, Systems LSI has also done a great deal to differentiate the Exynos 7420 from the 5433. Although the CPU architectures are shared, the A53 cluster is now clocked at 1.5 GHz instead of 1.3 GHz, and the A57 cluster at 2.1 GHz rather than 1.9 GHz. The memory controller is new and supports LPDDR4 running at 1555MHz. This means that the Galaxy S6 has almost double the theoretical memory bandwidth when compared to the Galaxy Note 4 Exynos variant, as we get a boost up to 24.88GB/s over the 5433's 13.20GB/s. We still need to test this to see how these claims translate to practical performance in a deep dive article in the future, as effective bandwidth and latency can often vary depending on vendor's memory settings and SoC's bus architecture.
Outside of the memory controller, LSI has also updated the 7420 to use a more powerful Mali T760MP8 GPU. Although the Exynos 5433 had a Mali T760 GPU as well, it had two fewer shader cores which means that achieving a given level of performance requires higher clock speeds and higher voltages to overcome circuit delay. This new GPU is clocked a bit higher as well, at 772 MHz compared to the 700 MHz of the GPU in the Exynos 5433. We see the same two-stage maximum frequency scaling mechanism as discovered in our Note 4 Exynos review, with less ALU biased loads being limited to 700MHz as opposed to the 5433's 600MHz. There's also a suspicion that Samsung was ready to go higher to compete with other vendors though, as we can see evidence of an 852 MHz clock state that is unused. Unfortunately deeply testing this SoC isn’t possible at this time as doing so would require disassembling the phone.
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stbutt - Sunday, April 19, 2015 - link
Wow. What an amazing review that was. I am astonished at how in depth and impartial it is. Congratulations to Mr Joshua Ho and ANANDTECH.watersb - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
Excellent detail. No way to exhaustively evaluate this decice in a single review, but this is the best I've seen. I read every word. Thanks!jasonjason - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
s6 edge is not in-cellUser.Name - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
Am I the only person that holds onto a smart phone for more than 18-24 months?I really dislike the trend of smart phones becoming more and more "disposable" items.
For my own requirements, they're honestly at the point now that they're fast enough, the screens are good enough, and I don't use the camera enough (I carry around a Sony NEX) that I could buy any of the high-end phones like this or an iPhone 6 and stick with it for the next five years. Storage is the only thing which I am constantly limited by.
Yes, you now have the option of a 128GB phone - well my music library alone is more than a terabyte in size. Now I don't *need* to carry my entire music library on my person at all times, but it would be nice if I could.
When you consider that a phone is also storing apps, games, photos, videos and other data, even 128GB is not a lot of storage. I may only have 30GB or so left over that I can dedicate to music after all that - which means that I'm better off still carrying around an old 160GB iPod. What I want more than anything is a phone which can finally replace that.
With a MicroSD slot, you can dedicate all of that storage to media. 64GB MicroSDXC cards are dirt-cheap right now, 128GB are a bit more expensive, and they currently top out at 200GB.
Well several years from now there may be 256GB, 384GB and 512GB cards available at the same prices 64/128/200GB cards are today.
The SDXC standard supports up to 2TB, so theoretically you could have that much storage in any phone with a MicroSDXC slot if such a card were ever released.
It just seems short-sighted to remove the MicroSD slot.
sevin7 - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
Your battery will likely need replacing before 5 years... having to ship you're phone off for a replacement battery is just as bad as the storage problemUser.Name - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
I actually mentioned a replaceable battery in my initial draft, intending to shuffle it to the end of the post, but I must have removed it instead.I completely agree, a replaceable standard battery is an important thing to have.
While I have done it, I don't want to have to disassemble a phone to replace the battery, and swap it out with a third-party one of questionable quality/safety standards.
Gorgenapper - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Micro SD cards are not as reliable as the internal flash memory (and obviously not as fast). I experienced this first hand when I went on vacation last summer and used my Samsung GS4 Active to take pics and videos. On the second night, I powered the phone off and swapped the batteries, and found that all the pics / videos I took for that day were gone, even though they had been showing in QuickPic when I got back to the hotel before powering the phone off.The micro SD card (Sandisk UHS-10 64gb) had gone into failsafe read-only mode due to failure. I had to connect to the WiFi every night and back my stuff up to Google Drive.
User.Name - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Perhaps I have been fortunate, but as long as I have paid for quality cards and checked that they are genuine (there are a lot of fake SanDisk cards out there) I have yet to have one fail on me. And moving to a read-only state is a pretty good failure mode if you ask me.But I don't think that MicroSD should *replace* the internal storage. That's why I want a phone with 128GB—or more—internal storage in addition to a MicroSD slot, so that the MicroSD is only used to store media.
I just want the option of having my phone replace the need for carrying around an old iPod. I don't plan on using MicroSD for running apps, or making up for the fact that the phone itself only has 8GB of storage.
der - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
I missed this review. Are you KIDDING ME Anandtech!sonicmerlin - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
You failed to mention there's a maddening delay when you use Samsung's replacement for "Ok, Google" voice activation features. They disabled the standard Google activation and replaced it with their inferior version.