The Samsung Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ Review
by Joshua Ho on October 2, 2015 8:00 AM ESTSystem Performance
While subjective judgments of performance may be possible to make when the delta is significant, when the gap gets increasingly close within the range of perceivable performance differences it becomes important to rely on more precise and accurate methods of measuring the overall performance of the mobile device. For the most part, when we’re discussing system performance the single biggest factor is often the SoC, which makes sense given that an SoC contains the CPU, GPU, video encode and decode blocks, memory bus, and DSPs. There are other aspects of the device that determine the overall perception of performance and things that can have a meaningful effect on performance, but the SoC is often the gating factor.
In order to test this we run mobile devices through our standard suite of benchmarks. In the case of the Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy S6 edge+, there shouldn’t be too many surprises given the commonality in components with the Galaxy S6.
If you guessed that performance in these benchmarks would be similar to the Galaxy S6, you'd be right. Given the shared SoC and general commonality in components performance remains as high as it is with the Galaxy S6. In some cases we see improvements, likely a combination of changes to Chrome and changes to areas like the frequency governor to respond faster to changes in load. It's probably fair to say that the Exynos 7420 will continue to be the best SoC for Android mobile devices in 2015, although it's likely that we'll see significantly increased competition for 2016.
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melgross - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link
The fact that you are willing to admit that you don't like iOS shows your own bias. Your bias won't allow you to read a review that goes against your bias. That's why you, and those others here who are biased against iOS, and Apple in general, find reviews that show products that you are biased for, to be worse than the iOS products, you say that the reviews are biased, rather that your views of the reviews.So you would prefer all reviews to be biased towards the products you like.
Tough! The reviews stand as they are.
KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link
You're angry about perceived bias that runs counter to your personal bias, even when that "bias" is backed up by hard data?Really?
beggerking@yahoo.com - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link
Well said. Anand had been extremely biased for years now.id4andrei - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Joshua, consider using Samsung's stock browser as it is better optimized. Vanilla Chrome is notorious for sucking hard across all Android devices. Apple optimizes constantly their web performance on mobile. Google does not care so much so Android OEMs have to go the extra mile.lopri - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
I also thought that was an odd change/omission since those benches do not take very long to conduct.lilmoe - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
It's very frustrating really. They did an article with the Note 4 showing that the stock browser (coupled with Exynos) is indeed more optimized. They then recently did an even more detailed technical article proving that Samsung's stock browser is MUCH faster and MUCH more efficient than Chrome, but then they completely ignore it and use Chrome...Oh well. I'm tired of asking them to do what they obviously DON'T want to do for whatever reason...
lopri - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
This is the reason given by the same author as to why he used Samsung's stock browser in the S6/Edge review."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."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9146/the-samsung-gal...
So what changed?
lilmoe - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Thanks for contributing more evidence as to why Anandtech's comparison charts are an inconsistent mess."So what changed?" I'm assuming you mean what has changed between the GS6 on release and the Note5?
I don't know....... More software optimization? Newer build of Android? Battery life? Potentially better performance because of more thermal headroom? Take a pick.
I'm able to draw my own conclusions from certain reviews. But it's getting harder and much more frustrating with time.
Kuzi - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Guys I get 3900ms on my Galaxy S6 For Kraken 1.1 using stock browser.I also think it's odd since most Android makers already include a faster stock browser with their phones. But hey, this is the new iAnandtech after all :)
ws3 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
So If Anandtech used the stock browser, the Galaxy S6 would leapfrog the two year old iPhone 5s and be only 2.25 slower than the iPhone 6s.