Samsung Galaxy S6 hype thread

[CakeMonster]

But what about features? I could sacrifice some CPU performance to get hardware encode/decode with the best video codecs enabling 4K 60fps recording for example...

 

[dawheat]

Agreed. For the first time since 2011 Qualcomm is selling the clearly worse chip. I wonder if Exynos will come stateside. That is tempting..

Begs the question how Qualcomm let them get into this situation. Did they think the Krait core would scale more than it did? Did they underestimate the complexity of a 64-bit SOC? Last I heard their own custom core won't be really available in 2015.

But what about features? I could sacrifice some CPU performance to get hardware encode/decode with the best video codecs enabling 4K 60fps recording for example...

I suppose the Exynos 5433 would provide some guidance here. I haven't heard Exynos owners of the Note 4 complaining that they're missing something.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Begs the question how Qualcomm let them get into this situation.

I bet their roadmap in say 2012 had them still having a 32bit cores in the flagship SoC in 2015. The 5S comes out with 64bit and one of their top guys gets fired for being so wrong.

This is all some last minute bandaids. Qualcomm never wanted to ship vanilla ARM on the high end but Apple made them do it.

 

[npaladin-2000]

They may be better off shipping a 32 bit Krait core...I mean seriously how much difference is 64 bit going to make until there's optimized code out there?

 

[poofyhairguy]

They may be better off shipping a 32 bit Krait core...I mean seriously how much difference is 64 bit going to make until there's optimized code out there?

It is a marketing problem, just like with the core count thing.

Qualcomm can't sell top shelf dual core SoCs or 32 bit SoCs, because if they do Rockchip or whoever will swoop in with four low power 64 bit cores and eat their lunch on a marketing bullet. Maybe if Apple was still 32bit they would have an argument, but that ship has sailed.

When Apple launched that 5S it was a headshot to the Qualcomm product line. This has been obvious for a while, I was beating the "Qualcomm's 2015 SoCs are going to suck" drum hard last year.

 

[dawheat]

It is a marketing problem, just like with the core count thing.

Qualcomm can't sell top shelf dual core SoCs or 32 bit SoCs, because if they do Rockchip or whoever will swoop in with four low power 64 bit cores and eat their lunch on a marketing bullet. Maybe if Apple was still 32bit they would have an argument, but that ship has sailed.

When Apple launched that 5S it was a headshot to the Qualcomm product line. This has been obvious for a while, I was beating the "Qualcomm's 2015 SoCs are going to suck" drum hard last year.

The only thing is, the Krait core really has been plateauing for a while. From the S800 introduced in summer 2013 to end of year 2014, the increase in performance has been relatively small, especially considering progress elsewhere.

How could QC think their Krait core could get through yet another year (2015)? The S805 is pretty much tapped out performance wise and a new arch was desperately needed, 64 bit or not.

So regardless of Apple, it feels like they dropped the ball completely on their own. Introducing a S806 with slightly higher clocks than the S805 would have been a complete disaster for them.

 

[lopri]

I wonder, how much of this "moar cores" philosphy is even useful in a phone? It doesn't seem like a cellphone OS is the most parallel of tasks.

Kind of like how useless 64-bit is on mobile, right? Especially when paired with 1 GB of RAM.

I'm impressed this has caught up to the current A series. From the A7 on, it has dominated its direct competition. For the first time in a while, even midway through the iPhone cycle, it looks like Samsung has caught up. Not exceeded in any real world case, but caught up at least for 6 months.

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/compare/1786937?baseline=1780313

At the risk of causing a flame war, I would say it is way beyond what Apple could achieve. It took Samsung more than 2 years to get big.LITTLE right. Fattening up cores and adding more cache is an easier route (see Denver) than load balancing among multiple different cores. Apple added another core this year in the iPad, with the space for a 4th.

Looking at the subtest scores, the 7420 sweeps the floor with the A8 in the integer tests except for Sobel, Lua, Dijkstra. I have no idea what those are and how Geekbench weighs the sub scores for the final scores. A8 better competes on floating-point, kind of like how K10 with fatter L3 used to be rather competitive to Core despite a deficit in integer.

But then again this is all academic. It's not like Apple is out there to sell the A8/A8X or is transitioning to big.LITTLE. Apple will keep using its SOCs whether their performance is better or worse than anyone else's, and vice versa.

They may be better off shipping a 32 bit Krait core...I mean seriously how much difference is 64 bit going to make until there's optimized code out there?

To be fair, the S810 does not look like a dud. It's just that the 7420 appears to be faster. Geekbench shows the S810's improvement over the S805 across the board. It is difficult to know how much improvement Krait would have on 20 nm process. Encryption hardware is also much needed regardless of 64-bit.

Crucially, we have no information on power consumption, which may be the most important metric after all.

 

[poofyhairguy]

The only thing is, the Krait core really has been plateauing for a while. From the S800 introduced in summer 2013 to end of year 2014, the increase in performance has been relatively small, especially considering progress elsewhere.

How could QC think their Krait core could get through yet another year (2015)?

Back in 2011 they pushed that Snapdragon core WAY past its effective life. The Snapdragon Skyrocket S2 was slayed by a Exynos S2, but LTE kept Qualcomm in the game.

 

[Graze]

They may be better off shipping a 32 bit Krait core...I mean seriously how much difference is 64 bit going to make until there's optimized code out there?

If you are developing on the NDK this may be true. For the SDK on lollipop(using ART) then some gains are supposed to be had without any code rewrite.

 

[ultimatebob]

Ya know, I doubt that your typical Samsung phone buyer gives a damn how many cores their phone's processor has. They just want something that's faster than their neighbor's iPhone 6

Honestly, I would be more concerned about the bloatware that Samsung and the carriers will add to Android 5 slowing down the phone more than the processor they choose.

 

[Strk]

http://www.phonedog.com/2015/01/28/...ice-wont-have-snapdragon-810-may-be-galaxy-s6

We still have to wait a month to be sure, but the rumors of it being an Exynos for everyone could be true.

 

[lopri]

^ Exact quote is as below.

We have lowered our outlook for the second half of fiscal 2015 in our semiconductor business, QCT, largely driven by the effects of:

• A shift in share among OEMs at the premium tier, which has reduced our near-term opportunity for sales of our integrated Snapdragon™ processors and has skewed our product mix towards more modem chipsets in this tier;
• Expectations that our Snapdragon 810 processor will not be in the upcoming design cycle of a large customer’s flagship device; and
• Heightened competition in China.

This all but confirms it. I am in shock, even after hearing about all the misfortunes of the S810.

What about the non-CPU portion of SOC? Is Exynos up to task?

 

[lopri]

BTW my 2 year old Note 8 has a horrendous battery life using LTE. The battery using LTE was not great even when it was new, though WiFi has been serviceable. The Exynos chip inside is composed of A9s, iirc. Not sure who made the modem.

 

[Harry_Wild]

I think Samsung wanted to be competitive "on the looks" and still make a profit per unit and probably could do that with Snapdragon 810 inside. Rumor is that the body will be all aluminum.

The iPhone 6, 6+ had very look learning curve in it since it took the iPod Touch 5th generation and made it just bigger. Samsung had to invent their technique from scratch in the Alpha and A series smartphones before the rumor S6!

 

[WelshBloke]

Rumor is that the body will be all aluminum.

I hope not! As long as they just replace the silver faux metal band with something durable I'd be happy. I actually like the dimpled soft touch on the black S5.
Maybe sort out a better speaker placement as well, that always looked a bit unfinished.

 

[dawheat]

I hope not! As long as they just replace the silver faux metal band with something durable I'd be happy. I actually like the dimpled soft touch on the black S5.
Maybe sort out a better speaker placement as well, that always looked a bit unfinished.

It would be a bit odd that their flagship line (Galaxy S) isn't fully metallic when their upper midrange line (A-series) is fully metallic.

I think it's 100% sure at minimum it'll have a metal frame like the Note 4, but I was fully expecting it to have a similar metal back to the A-series. It'll have microSD support, but I do think it's possible that replaceable batteries go away.

If the S6 manages to have battery life between the Z3 and Z3 Compact, then I'd understand for most users, that's more than enough battery life. IMO it's possible if the S6 display continues the power efficiency gains seen in the Note 4, the Exynos 7420 ends up being on 14nm and very efficient, and they fit in a larger battery (since non-removables tend to be larger for equal casings).

 

[foghorn67]

Ugh, no Qualcomm turbo-charging.

 

[oobydoobydoo]

Samsung seems to have taken up the design of the S6 as a challenge, and I think they will come out the gate strong with this one. I read about the S810 issues months ago, and I have to agree with Poofyhairguy about a last-minute change to Qualcomms roadmaps on the introduction of the 5s. It would be a marketing nightmare for Qualcomm to go 32 bit in 2015.


Hopefully Samsung doesn't muck the GPU up. The stock ARM Mali GPUs have never been impressive, and that's really what Qualcomm does best in comparison to Exynos. Even with all that blazing CPU performance if Samsung doesn't make the GPU decent and Qualcomm uses it's Adreno GPUs the S810 could still come out on top.

 

[WelshBloke]

It would be a marketing nightmare for Qualcomm to go 32 bit in 2015.

I dont get that at all.

People were really choosing what phone to buy depending on if the SOC was 64bit capable?

People would go into their preferred phone supplier and go 'I shall shun those lesser 32bit SOCs, I need a 64bit one because... for the... um... I NEED THE BIGGER NUMBERS DAMMIT!!!'

 

[npaladin-2000]

That's pretty much it, "I have no idea what bits are or what they do, but I want more than the Jones!"

 

[dawheat]

I dont get that at all.

People were really choosing what phone to buy depending on if the SOC was 64bit capable?

People would go into their preferred phone supplier and go 'I shall shun those lesser 32bit SOCs, I need a 64bit one because... for the... um... I NEED THE BIGGER NUMBERS DAMMIT!!!'

But with Android 5.0, wouldn't a 32-bit SOC be disadvantaged in benchmarks and such? Sure they could get through the marketing disadvantage and maybe there wouldn't be much real world difference between the S810 and whatever a 20-nm S805 would be, but competitors would likely be able to trumpet superior scores.

 

[WelshBloke]

But with Android 5.0, wouldn't a 32-bit SOC be disadvantaged in benchmarks and such?

Would they? And which ones? And really, do people buying phones look at benchmarks that much?

Sure they could get through the marketing disadvantage and maybe there wouldn't be much real world difference between the S810 and whatever a 20-nm S805 would be, but competitors would likely be able to trumpet superior scores.

Which competitors? And how are they going to lever a 64bit advantage?

Honestly, 64bit means nothing in the mobile world.

 

[npaladin-2000]

Which competitors? And how are they going to lever a 64bit advantage?

Honestly, 64bit means nothing in the mobile world.

Not yet anyway, not even close, it's pretty pointless except as a marketing point. It's possible when the code and memory is out there to take advantage of it, then it might. But it's not like it needs to keep pace with desktop platforms. Heck the only reason we're on 64 bit processors on desktops is for RAM addressing, most applications are still actually 32 bit.

 

[lopri]

64-bit wouldn't mean much on the mobile by just being 64-bit, but didn't ARM improve the instruction sets going from ARMv7 to ARMv8?

 

[Commodus]

64-bit wouldn't mean much on the mobile by just being 64-bit, but didn't ARM improve the instruction sets going from ARMv7 to ARMv8?

Exactly. ARMv8 is a significant reason behind Apple's A7 and A8 performing as well as the Snapdragon 800-series chips of their era (in certain cases, better) despite half the cores and lower clock speeds. Going 64-bit earlier than everyone else just happened to be a nice side benefit.

It sounds like the S810 and Exynos 7 Octa will get a nice boost from ARMv8 and pull ahead of the A8, although that's somewhat expected given that they're coming half a year later.