Samsung Exynos Thread (big.LITTLE Octa-core)

[krumme]

The results from this Note 4 (Exynos 5433) vs Moto Maxx (S805) game performance comparison were quite surprising to me. If you look at the available synthetic graphics benchmarks for Android - Adreno 420 usually posts a single-digit (5-10%) performance advantage compared to Mali T760MP6, with some exceptions like BasemarkX High Quality.

Meanwhile, using the Gamebench app to analyse in-game performance @ demanding titles Exynos came out ahead in every game tested.

Here are the results:

Exynos 5433 vs Snapdragon 805
- Asphalt 8: 60 vs 29 FPS
- Dead Trigger 2: 45 vs 34 FPS
- GTA San Andreas: 26 vs 15 FPS
- Modern Combat 5: 29 vs 27 FPS
- N.O.V.A 3: 28 vs 24 FPS
- Real Racing 3: 30 vs 25 FPS

GTA San Andreas is a real bad port, I remmember playing it at ~10 FPS with a LG G3 @ Max settings. It pegs one core at 100% and barely touches the rest. Cortex A57's single thread advantage (compared to Krait) finally allows it to be playable/fluid at max settings inside a phone. The real surprise came from other titles, I didn't expect Mali T760MP6 to deliver better (and more consistent) performance in GPU intensive titles like Modern Combat 5 and Dead Trigger 2.

Perhaps it's time to include in-game performance results from the most demanding titles in Android phone and tablet reviews? I wish AnandTech did something like this @ Galaxy S6 (Exynos 7420) review, not just the usual 3DMark and GFXBench stuff.

Thanx. Agree lets get some real game results. Its about time!

With those results lppr4 for s6 is really interesting. We get better understanding of mem bandwidth effect. Preferably in real games.

 

[Sweepr]

Pretty much all rumours confirmed. Unlike previous Samsung phones Galaxy S6 ditches Qualcomm in favour of an in-house 14nm Exynos SoC.

Big display (5.1 inches)
High-resolution display (1440 x 2560 pixels)
Extremely high pixel density screen, over 430ppi (577 ppi)
High-resolution camera (16 megapixels)
8-core processor
Lots of RAM (3072 MB RAM)
Small dimensions (5.65 x 2.78 x 0.27 inches)
Thin body, measuring less than 7.5mm/0.3inches (0.27 inches)
32GB, 64GB, 128GB
Launch April 10th @ 20 countries

 

[Sweepr]

Live from MWC:

Exynos 7420: 20% faster performance and 35% more power efficient than 20nm Exynos 5433/7410 inside Galaxy Note 4.
Dual-channel LPDDR4.
Universal Flash Storage 2.0.

From Samsung Exynos account @ Twitter:

They will give more details about Exynos 7420 two days from now.

 

[witeken]

Pretty disappointed about the battery, though. The QHD screen will probably not be friendly for the battery life.

 

[Sweepr]

Pretty disappointed about the battery, though. The QHD screen will probably not be friendly for the battery life.

Galaxy Note 4's QHD screen is more efficient than Galaxy Note 3's 1080p screen. Samsung has top-notch displays and Galaxy S6 should further improve on that.

With each successive generation Samsung has been systematically improving the power efficiency of their OLED displays. We measured a 14 percent improvement in display power efficiency between the Galaxy Note 3 and the Note 4, which is especially impressive given that the Note 4 has almost double the number of pixels and therefore much higher processing overhead.

 

[krumme]

Great about 14nm finfet confirmation. That is absolutely great news. It means yield is good and ramping is fast.

As for AT article online now we get LPDDR4 to. That means as i recall double bandwith right - so we will see some drastic improvement in GPU perf.
Leakage is also down because of finfet - a major benefit imo for practical usage and battery life.
Using a bigger battery for the s6 would make no sense.

The S6 looks stellar btw.

 

[witeken]

Galaxy Note 4's QHD screen is more efficient than Galaxy Note 3's 1080p screen. Samsung has top-notch displays and Galaxy S6 should further improve on that.

Doesn't take away that 1080p would have been even better still.

 

[krumme]

Doesn't take away that 1080p would have been even better still.

I can see the difference with my eyes. Thats good enough for me.
But why not keep it OT. All that sour remarks - its not about the phone anyway is it. Why not cheer up mate. This is just good for us consumers.

 

[Sweepr]

Doesn't take away that 1080p would have been even better still.

That's up for debate, but higher resolution makes sense for them given that Samsung is pushing Gear VR hard this year.

Great about 14nm finfet confirmation. That is absolutely great news. It means yield is good and ramping is fast.

As for AT article online now we get LPDDR4 to. That means as i recall double bandwith right - so we will see some drastic improvement in GPU perf.
Leakage is also down because of finfet - a major benefit imo for practical usage and battery life.
Using a bigger battery for the s6 would make no sense.

The S6 looks stellar btw.

Indeed, incredible device.

Design: Looks much much better built than the previous S5. Metal frame makes a lot of difference in hand and I really like the front and rear Gorilla Glass 4 panels. I would like a higher screen to body ratio though. It's nice to see Samsung inovating and taking bold steps, I usually prefer HTC phones in terms of design but the M9 looks a lot like M7/M8 IMHO.

Specs: Exactly what you'd expect from a Samsung flagship. Borrows a lot from the Exynos Galaxy Note 4 (A57/A53 + Mali T760 GPU - Exynos SoC, 3GB RAM, 2560x1440 AMOLED screen, 16MP rear camera with OIS using Sony IMX240 sensor) and improves on it (14nm FinFET, LPDDR4) inside a smaller/thinner package. I wouldn't be surprised if it offers significantly improved battery life compared to the Galaxy S5, even though the battery itself is smaller (2550 vs 2800 mAh). Unfortunately removable battery and MicroSD slot are gone, I hope Samsung keeps those features on the Note 5, giving consumers two different approaches: definitive iPhone alternative/killer with the S line and great versatility for professionals with the Note line.

 

[Fjodor2001]

Unlike previous Samsung phones Galaxy S6 ditches Qualcomm in favour of an in-house 14nm Exynos SoC.

Ouch! That's gotta be a huge blow to Qualcomm. I wonder how much of their sales volume is cut away by Samsung ditching them, 50%?

 

[Arachnotronic]

Ouch! That's gotta be a huge blow to Qualcomm. I wonder how much of their sales volume is cut away by Samsung ditching them, 50%?

LOL, no. It's on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. The company already said at its most recent investor conference that it lost the S6.

 

[krumme]

Most note 4 is qcom 805 so in that sense the Exynos looks like a huge step forward and 805 suddenly looks quite antique - it can be a problem in the lineup. Also for design. The s6 is a new standard especially for the edge version.

The interesting part now for me is cellular battery life and dsp performance in the new Exynos part.
The real world performance of the new ram and storage is also highly interesting.

 

[kpkp]

Doesn't take away that 1080p would have been even better still.

Is there any evidence that shows that one OLED uses more power then 2 half it's size?

 

[krumme]

LOL, no. It's on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. The company already said at its most recent investor conference that it lost the S6.

At say 25M devices at 40usd a pcx its one B. That probably on the high side but anyway qcom loses no so much from s6 but from tsmc general slow ramp of it / designfailure of 810.
Its then also a loss of brandvalue. But lets wailt and see. Usually qcom socs have very good overall quality and performance so we need reviews !

 

[Arachnotronic]

At say 25M devices at 40usd a pcx its one B. That probably on the high side but anyway qcom loses no so much from s6 but from tsmc general slow ramp of it / designfailure of 810.
Its then also a loss of brandvalue. But lets wailt and see. Usually qcom socs have very good overall quality and performance so we need reviews !

Qualcomm lowered its guidance by less than $1b as a result of the S6 loss and other factors, so I'd say that estimate is on the high side. Remember that QCOM never had the Samsung Galaxy phones as exclusives; always both an Exynos version and Snapdragon version. QCOM is losing the Snapdragon version.

 

[Fjodor2001]

LOL, no. It's on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. The company already said at its most recent investor conference that it lost the S6.

Well, what other companies buy the rest of the Qualcomm sales volume in quantities worth mentioning? Sony, LG, HTC, ...? Samsung has by far the greatest mobile phone market share of those.

Also, currently it may only be the S6 for Samsung, but now that Samsung have their own chip, likely more models will migrate to that or similar variants going forward. Economy of scale that will be beneficial for Samsung that way.

 

[dawheat]

Doesn't take away that 1080p would have been even better still.

I assume you're referring to GPU performance? I'm sure you know AMOLEDs don't work like LCDs - higher resolution doesn't mean more or less power draw from the display by itself. In fact, you can see lower power usage.

2K GPU performance - yeah, possibly.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Well, what other companies buy the rest of the Qualcomm sales volume in quantities worth mentioning? Sony, LG, HTC, ...? Samsung has by far the greatest mobile phone market share of those.

Also, currently it may only be the S6 for Samsung, but now that Samsung have their own chip, likely more models will migrate to that or similar variants going forward. Economy of scale that will be beneficial for Samsung that way.

Samsung generally always does Exynos and Snapdragon variants of phones.

 

[jdubs03]

Samsung generally always does Exynos and Snapdragon variants of phones.

But didn't Samsung use QCOMM for it's North American phones, and the international editions use Exynos? That may be a big difference for the future, because it isn't apparent that they will use any QCOMM 810's at all.

 

[Sweepr]

Most note 4 is qcom 805 so in that sense the Exynos looks like a huge step forward and 805 suddenly looks quite antique

Agreed, and most people will be upgrading from Galaxy S5 or earlier phones anyway. Compared to an S801 Galaxy S5:

Geekbench Multi-Thread
Snapdragon 801: ~3000
Exynos 7420: ~5400

Geekbench Single-Thread
Snapdragon 801: ~950
Exynos 7420: ~1500

GFXBench scores estimated by multiplying Exynos 5433/7410's Mali T760MP6 scores under Lollipop by 1.3x.

GFXBench T-Rex Offscreen
Snapdragon 801: 11,5 FPS
Exynos 7420 (estimated): 23 FPS

GFXBench Manhattan Offscreen
Snapdragon 801: 26,4 FPS
Exynos 7420 (estimated): 50 FPS

Very solid 60-80% CPU performance bump and nearly twice the graphics performance. Also despite having 77% more pixels to push - per-pixel performance goes up.

GFXBench T-Rex Onscreen
Snapdragon 801: 11,7 FPS
Exynos 7420 (estimated): 14,3 FPS

GFXBench Manhattan Onscreen
Snapdragon 801: 27,7 FPS
Exynos 7420 (estimated): 32,5 FPS

 

[Sweepr]

T-Mobile just confirmed that US models will also receive Exynos this time, if there was still any doubt.

As one can see, there are a few key highlights of note in the Galaxy S 6. The Exynos 7420 SoC is the first SoC to be built on Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process. While this isn’t comparable to Intel’s 14nm process due to the use of a 20nm metal interconnect, there are some density improvements in areas that aren’t gated by interconnect pitch.

Outside of process node, the Exynos 7420 is a rather standard big.LITTLE SoC, with four Cortex A57s at 2.1 GHz and four Cortex A53s at 1.5 GHz. However, the Exynos 7420 represents the first Exynos SoC to have full AArch64 support in software, unlike the Exynos 5433. The SoC supports LPDRR4 and Samsung has equipped the Galaxy S6 with a UFS 2.0 storage solution. It remains to be seen whether this is a major point of differentiation this year, but in practice it seems that the Galaxy S 6 was smooth.

www.anandtech.com/show/8999/samsung-announces-the-galaxy-s6

By the way, everyday there is more evidence that Exynos 5433 will eventually be upgraded to 64-bit: www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg401771.html

 

[III-V]

But didn't Samsung use QCOMM for it's North American phones, and the international editions use Exynos? That may be a big difference for the future, because it isn't apparent that they will use any QCOMM 810's at all.

I think most/part of Europe used the Snapdragon variant as well.

 

[III-V]

Well, what other companies buy the rest of the Qualcomm sales volume in quantities worth mentioning? Sony, LG, HTC, ...? Samsung has by far the greatest mobile phone market share of those.

They still sell a boatload of modems and NICs, even outside the handheld world. They have a ton of cash on hand too, IIRC.

Samsung will likely replace Qualcomm in their less well-known devices, as you mentioned. It won't be the end of the world though, and honestly, it was inevitable.

I think MediaTek, Intel's modems and SoFIA are a bigger threat to Qualcomm, really, in the long term. I could be completely wrong, though -- I have not really studied Qualcomm's revenue sources. Maybe I'll go look...

 

[Sweepr]

First benchmarks are in:

AnTuTu: 68896
Basemark OS II: 1269
Kraken 1.1: 4323

Basemark X: 22752
GFX T-Rex Offscreen: 49 FPS
GFXBench Manhattan Offscreen: 23 FPS
GFXBench T-Rex Onscreen: 35 FPS
GFXBench Manhattan Offscreen: 16 FPS

www.gsmarena.com/samsung_mwc_2015-review-1217p5.php

Almost nailed the offscreen results with my prediction above. Curiously Exynos 7420's performance penalty for increasing the resolution from 1080P to QHD is slightly smaller than Exynos 5433/7410, probably a direct result of the increased memory bandwidth (LPDDR4). GFXbench Offscreen (1080P) tests show ~30% performance improvement while onscreen scores (QHD) are 35-40% better than Mali T760MP6 (Exynos 5433/7410 - LPDDR3).

One of the reasons for that insane AnTuTu score (other than the SoC itself) is the addition of Universal Flash Storage 2.0.

 

[Idontcare]

Pretty disappointed about the battery, though. The QHD screen will probably not be friendly for the battery life.

If you were going to carry a second battery to swap out when needed then you can almost as easily carry an external phone battery/charger like this one.

I carry one for all of my iGadgets and it isn't an issue. Never been reduced to being a "wall hugger" because of it, and I doubt S6 users will become wall huggers either.