The Huawei P8 Lite Review
by Brandon Chester on July 27, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
GPU Performance
The Adreno 405 GPU is an interesting part. Because Snapdragon 615 is approaching upon Qualcomm's high end SoCs there's significantly more power on the GPU side of things than you'll get with SoCs meant for more low end devices like Snapdragon 410.
In 3DMark's graphics test we see that Adreno 405 holds a large lead over Adreno 305/306. The score achieved is more than twice as high. The physics test has a poor showing, lagging behind even the Snapdragon 400 based Moto G. Since the CPU side of Snapdragon 615 is certainly faster it's clear that this slowness is due to problems with Dalvik, which in turn is due to the P8 Lite shipping with KitKat. In the end the overall score isn't quite twice that of the Moto E, but it's still a significant improvement.
I don't have results for BaseMark X on the 2015 Moto E as the benchmark crashes before it completes. Unfortunately this means there's no Snapdragon 410 device to be used as a reference in this test. In the on screen results the P8 Lite doesn't come in last, but the only slower device is the LG G3 with its relatively unbalanced combination of an Adreno 330 GPU and a 2560x1440 display. In the off screen tests the P8 Lite falls behind the other devices tested, but it's not an unexpected result given the flagship status of the other devices on the chart.
The last GPU test is GFXBench 3.0. In both T-Rex HD and Manhattan, the offscreen performance of Adreno 405 shows a large improvement over the performance of the 2015 Moto E. In fact, both tests have the P8 Lite achieving almost three times the performance of the Moto E. While the Moto E is obviously a cheaper device, the results show the significant GPU gains that Snapdragon 615 devices have compared to Snapdragon 410 devices.
Overall, the GPU performance of the Huawei P8 Lite is actually very good for a $249 device. One should definitely note that the ASUS Zenfone 2 is significantly faster and only costs $199, but that's quite an edge case and there really aren't many other devices at this price point that offer the GPU performance that the P8 Lite does.
NAND Performance
NAND performance is another important aspect of mobile devices. Poor NAND can be a serious bottleneck of system performance whenever something is being loaded from the internal storage, or when a background app is doing reads and writes or downloading updates.
The P8 Lite comes in last for both random read and random write speeds. In the case of random read speeds the gap between it and the next device is fairly significant as well.
Sequential reads and writes on the P8 Lite are in a much better situation than random reads and writes, with the P8 Lite being faster than both the Moto E and Moto G in both cases. While it's not as fast as the latest flagship devices, I don't think it's at a point where it will cause any problems for the type of users who will purchase a phone like the P8 Lite.
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joeroyhud - Monday, July 27, 2015 - link
The P8 Lite supports LTE band 12, which makes it attractive if you're a T-Mobile customer like I am. I got the phone on sale a couple months ago for $200. I like the size and the performance and the battery life, but it's overpriced at $250.Glock24 - Monday, July 27, 2015 - link
This phone seems like a bad choice. Glad I got a ZenFone 2, but sure since I got the 4GB RAM/64GB flash version it cost me $300. Battery life on ZF2 is not great, but has improved a bit with system updates. I guess if the P8 Lite had Android 5.0 it would have even worse battery life.austinsguitar - Monday, July 27, 2015 - link
g4 pleaseedwd2 - Monday, July 27, 2015 - link
SD615 is a plain no for me. It's arguably worse than the SD600 and the MT6752 smokes it in every aspect at a lower price point.Speedfriend - Tuesday, July 28, 2015 - link
"As for performance, Snapdragon 615 is really the best you're going to get at this price point unless you go with the Zenfone 2 which is something of an anomaly in many ways. "Which begs the question why more manufacturers aren't using Intel chips which clearly smash the performance of any other mid range priced offerings?
Stick an Intel chip in a Moto G and I'll buy that!
LiverpoolFC5903 - Tuesday, July 28, 2015 - link
Agree, I dont understand why more manufacturers do not use the newer Silvermont based Intel chips, considering the performance levels and the low price. Much better than using mediocre socs like Snapdragon 410/615 at similar price points. Having used the ZF2, I can personally attest to its performance in handling anything Android has to offer.Buk Lau - Wednesday, July 29, 2015 - link
The answer is simple, Intel chips don't come with integrated modems. just look at zenfone 2, that thing comes with XMM 7262 with CAT 6 LTE disabled, and if this doesn't show you the problem already, Qualcomm's Gobi modem even comes with integrated GPS solution whereas Asus has to include a Broadcom solution. so just by using these atoms you already have to include 2 other chips whereas Qualcomm just gives you an all-in-one solution. then the choice is obvious, unless intel is literally paying money to you, which they did, what incentive is there for you to use their more complicated solution instead of qualcomm's? and this is how qualcomm got to become what it is today. back in the old days qualcomm's SoCs suffered even worse overheating and performance and yet OEMs still persist to use their stuff, simply because they offered an integrated modem. in a sense, OEMs only have themselves to blame rather than qualcomm for having to release junk phones all over this year, if they didn't spoil qualcomm so much back then, there wouldn't be so little choices in the SoC marketBadelhas - Tuesday, July 28, 2015 - link
The European / Asian version has Lollipop UI Emotion 3.1 and the their own HiSilicon's Kirin 620 SoC. Is it possible to review that one? Seems much better than the American version...A friend of mine bought one and it´s pretty slick, even if I continue to prefer the Moto E, considering the price.
PrinceGaz - Tuesday, July 28, 2015 - link
eww, you've got really hairy arms! (just joking, there were complaints in the comments about the iWatch that the guy wearing it had hairless arms :)So why would I want a phone with eight A53 CPUs? In my experience with a quad-core tablet, it rarely uses more than two of them fully when it is running at full speed, with the third and fourth cores doing a bit of work but hardly ever even approaching fully utilised (probably just running the tasks that need to be run anyway, so their main purpose is taking a tiny bit of work off the other cores).
Given that a 64-bit CPU is a bit unnecessary when phones have yet to reach 4GB RAM, and probably counter-productive power-wise as a result (just look at A15/A7 vs A57/A53), whilst benchmarks may run faster on a quad-core 1.5GHz A53, I suspect I'm better off with my old dual-core 1.7GHz Krait for most daily usage. It lasts me all day and never feels slow, and most of the time (according to a CPU usage monitor) one of the cores isn't being used much. I don't play 3D games much on my phone; so I never tax the GPU, therefore the Adreno 305 is perfectly fine for me,
What workload other than benchmarks requires more than two CPU cores? The main one that occurs to me is a browser, in which case you would be much better off culling battery draining processes rather than running them.
Ethos Evoss - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
pls honor 7 reviewthnx