More Galaxy smartphones?

[onionring]

I'm pretty sure every iPhone when they were released were the fastest smartphones for at least 6 months, sans the 5s which is still one of the fastest smartphones. The 5 was faster than its competition at the time: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6330/the-iphone-5-review/10

 

to that I d like to point out the ''stock browser'' performance and other tests are skewered by the fact they dont use the same program to benchmark making it meaning less,

it s like saying this computer running ubuntu can open firefox faster than this windows 8 pc can open IE, t doesn t help to see what hardware is faster

now if we were to trust the benchmarks, a samsung s3 a9 is a faster cpu (and yes i was talking about the physical chip inside(apple modified a chip to increase the memory performance)) than the a6 apple used. it s the software that does the difference.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/136291-iphone-5-benchmarks-slower-than-the-galaxy-s3-faster-than-the-nexus-7

[Builder]

-snip-

Sorry, bit hard to catch your meaning under the grammar mistakes. I didn't mean to offend you.

[Builder]

-snip-

Sorry, could you link to the running out of memory so I can read up on it?

 

Also, I don't know what you're talking about with the A7 benchmarks, Anand was the one who discovered the cheating and he did it by using the same benchmark on two devices. Also, I frequently have 20+ tabs open on my iPhone and don't experience any lag at all. It could very well be just me, but I've just never heard of these problems before. I know what you mean by expunging though, if you open up a ton of apps it will eventually just start closing them without telling you to free up memory for the current app. You won't even notice, it leaves the card in the multitasking for it, but it will have to relaunch when you enter it again. That is definitely a problem for some people, but I'm neurotic about closing apps when I'm done with them so I have never hit the upper limit of it.

 

If there's anything the 8350 tells us, it's that more cores does not equal more performance. Optimizing apps for 64-bit is far easier than optimizing them for multiple threads. They decided to go with 64-bit first, and I bet we'll see more cores in the next iPhone. I don't blame Apple for not going all out at once, they regulate their system tightly to ensure that all the apps in the app store work. Qualcomm also only makes ARM chips, whereas now they design the entire device. Samsung buys a Qualcomm design and puts their other hardware around it, Apple licenses an ARM architecture and builds their chips from the ground up. That's really tough to do, it's a job I hope I never have.

 

I don't distrust you, but I do find this kind of thing fascinating and I LOVE reading about it.

[Faa]

Also, I frequently have 20+ tabs open on my iPhone and don't experience any lag at all.

20? 8 seems to be the limit.

[Builder]

20? 8 seems to be the limit.

Sorry, I meant multitasked apps.

[Faa]

Sorry, I meant multitasked apps.

Why would you confuse tabs with apps? Also speed is complety subjective, a 200ms delay might be fast for you but for some others it would be horrible. Just don't compare what you find fast with others. Mobile devices need more processing power, will be effective for battery life as well.

[Builder]

Why would you confuse tabs with apps? Also speed is complety subjective, a 200ms delay might be fast for you but for some others it would be horrible. Just don't compare what you find fast with others. Mobile devices need more processing power, will be effective for battery life as well.

You got hostile very quickly. I'm tired, I've been on this forum 12 hours a day for nearly a week. 

 

Call it what you want, confusion, hyperbole, I don't care. There's no need to perpetuate this discussion.

 

Wait what? Speed is subjective? That's not true. What are we even arguing over?

[Wasaa12]

Why would you confuse tabs with apps? Also speed is complety subjective, a 200ms delay might be fast for you but for some others it would be horrible. Just don't compare what you find fast with others. Mobile devices need more processing power, will be effective for battery life as well.

I agree with the thing of more processing power but for multitasking or having many tabs open what you need is more RAM

[martinrox1568]

I would like to point out I wrote S3, S4, S5 not 3S , etc

meaning two things:

1) I was talking about Samsung galaxy S3, S4, S5

2) You re overdefensive about Apple

 

http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/samsung-galaxy-s5-vs-galaxy-s4

 

The advance of 2X the performance each phone generation (when they both use the best that was available) are long gone, I m sorry but that s just the reality.

Just look at a S4 qualcom 600 vs a S5 qualcom 800, the first get a benchmark score(let s oversimplify things here) of 2300, the other 2900, that s 20% upgrade, not 100%

It will still be worth while to upgrade but not each year, no way, heck even a S3 is still fine today.

 

and btw what s the point of a faster cpu in a phone if it s already fast enough and doesn t lag, it s not like you re rendering videos on it.

(also a ''8 core'' mobile cpu doesn t mean it performs better, the 4 more cores are usually only there for low power use and that s almost exclusively used in note phones)

 

now to talk about apple since you want to..

Now you could argue that the iphone 5 to iphone 5S was a huge jump, well of course if the last gen's cpu/gpu/ram wasn t the fastest they could have used to begin with it s easier to make it look like huge gains were made...

(i don t deny that gains were made, i m just saying the iphone 5's cpu was slower that it should have been while the 5S's is one of the best cpu out there now making the performance gap huge not because they (Samsung) made a breakthru in cpu making but because they just chose to pay for a better cpu this time)

Yea this post makes no sense. The 5 in its time was ahead of what snapdragon or nvidia offered with their tegra 3+ and snapdragon 400 quadcore. And why are you talking about 2x performance in phone generations with the snapdragon 600 & 800? He was talking about Apple increasing their performance. And then you go about "whats the point of a faster cpu". So you would like there to be no development in cpu?? Every little bit helps. When i got the Nexus 7 2013, it felt smooth as butter, but now my nexus 5 makes it feel slow. And what are you talking about 8 cores? who mentioned that?

[Nineshadow]

I can't facepalm any more while looking at this thread...

please make it stop.

[LAwLz]

Sorry, could you link to the running out of memory so I can read up on it?

I can't seem to find the first time he mentioned it (probably in the Mobile Show 002 but I am not sure) but he mentioned it in his iPad Air review. Quote here:

 

Although things seem to have improved with iOS 7.0.3, the 64-bit builds of the OS still seem to run into stability issues more frequently than their 32-bit counterparts. I still see low memory errors associated with any crashes. It could just be that the move to 64-bit applications (and associated memory pressure) is putting more stress on iOS’ memory management routines, which in turn exposes some weaknesses. The iPad Air crashed a couple of times on me (3 times total during the past week), but no where near as much as earlier devices running iOS 7.0.1.

 

So yeah... His iPad Air crashed about every other day because of crappy memory. Not to mention the very aggressive way of throwing stuff out of the cache (which drives me nuts).

He also takes more in depth about it but the bottom line is that iOS is in dire need of more RAM.

 

 

Also, I don't know what you're talking about with the A7 benchmarks, Anand was the one who discovered the cheating and he did it by using the same benchmark on two devices. Also, I frequently have 20+ tabs open on my iPhone and don't experience any lag at all. It could very well be just me, but I've just never heard of these problems before. I know what you mean by expunging though, if you open up a ton of apps it will eventually just start closing them without telling you to free up memory for the current app. You won't even notice, it leaves the card in the multitasking for it, but it will have to relaunch when you enter it again. That is definitely a problem for some people, but I'm neurotic about closing apps when I'm done with them so I have never hit the upper limit of it.

Well I think my analogy with the iPhone vs Android benchmark was pretty clear. They change too many variables to be a valid "CPU X vs CPU Y" benchmark. If you want to test two CPUs head to head you need to run the same software. Sadly Apple won't let any other browser than Safari be on the iPhone (even Chrome is just a Safari skin) and they won't release Safari on Android (and even if they did we wouldn't know if they crippled the performance).

What we need are solid, cross-platform programs that tried to perform as well as possible and that can actually utilize all the resources we throw at it. Then we could do proper tests.

 

Just to clarify, the Android cheating has nothing to do with the iPhone. I just wanted to point out that only LG and HTC does it anymore. The rest of the big manufacturers are clean. Not sure about some other brands (like Oppo) though.

 

I do notice that it deletes my tabs, and it's very annoying. Especially when I am on a mobile connection because it takes quite a long time to load (sometimes, depending on my signal strength) and it wastes my monthly data limit.

 

 

If there's anything the 8350 tells us, it's that more cores does not equal more performance. Optimizing apps for 64-bit is far easier than optimizing them for multiple threads. They decided to go with 64-bit first, and I bet we'll see more cores in the next iPhone. I don't blame Apple for not going all out at once, they regulate their system tightly to ensure that all the apps in the app store work. Qualcomm also only makes ARM chips, whereas now they design the entire device. Samsung buys a Qualcomm design and puts their other hardware around it, Apple licenses an ARM architecture and builds their chips from the ground up. That's really tough to do, it's a job I hope I never have.

I agree.I agree with most of what you said in this part. A few things I don't agree with or get though.

I agree that more cores doesn't necessarily mean more performance. That's what I said "raw performance" and by that I mean "what the device is capable of in a perfect scenario". It is very tricky to make software that takes advantage of more than a few cores and that's why we don't see a whole lot of them. The programs that really need the performance will usually support it though. My browser, video player, camera app, a lot of my games, RSS reader, photo viewer etc all can use my 4 cores, and they very often do.

There isn't really any drawback to more cores either since they can all be individually power gated. When they are not used they are completely shut off as if they didn't exist. I like that Apple are focusing on two really powerful cores, but at the end of the day it's still just a dual core, and a really low clocked one at that. It's just not as capable as some of the quad and octa cores out there in terms of raw performance.

 

Samsung desires their own SoCs as well by the way. Their Exynos chips uses the vanilla ARM designs (and sometimes PowerVR designs for the GPU) but there is still quite a bit of things to do on an SoC.

Not all of their devices uses Qualcomm designed chips.

[onionring]

Yea this post makes no sense. The 5 in its time was ahead of what snapdragon or nvidia offered with their tegra 3+ and snapdragon 400 quadcore. And why are you talking about 2x performance in phone generations with the snapdragon 600 & 800? He was talking about Apple increasing their performance. And then you go about "whats the point of a faster cpu". So you would like there to be no development in cpu?? Every little bit helps. When i got the Nexus 7 2013, it felt smooth as butter, but now my nexus 5 makes it feel slow. And what are you talking about 8 cores? who mentioned that?

 

K let s do this in order here, I said:

 

maybe it was 5 years ago, now nothing much is changing, I mean the s3-4-5 have almost identical specs, the only thing different is the moar pixel (that you can t see) treand and some software.

(any additional power(if any) is wasted on the screen) (this part was a hyperbole, you know exaggerating to make a point)

 

Here s a reply I got:

 

Ehh... There are huge difference between each one.

 

I'd say those are pretty decent upgrades each year.

The specs are nowhere near "almost identical". Each CPU leap is as big as if Intel would make the i7-5770K an octa core, or make it run at 8GHz at stock. Doubling (and sometimes more) performance in a year is not a small feat and I think they should get credit for that. Also, the extra performance is very noticeable. If they hadn't upgraded the RAM then you wouldn't want to use an iPhone 5S because it would be absolutely awful. Complete garbage with just 256MB of RAM.

 

To which I replied

 

 

I would like to point out I wrote S3, S4, S5 not 3S , etc

The advance of 2X the performance each phone generation are long gone, I m sorry but that s just the reality.

Just look at a S4 qualcom 600 vs a S5 qualcom 800, the first get a benchmark score(let s oversimplify things here) of 2300, the other 2900, that s 20% upgrade, not 100%

It will still be worth while to upgrade but not each year, no way, heck even a S3 is still fine today.

 

and btw what s the point of a faster cpu in a phone if it s already fast enough and doesn t lag, it s not like you re rendering videos on it.

(also a ''8 core'' mobile cpu doesn t mean it performs better, the 4 more cores are usually only there for low power use and that s almost exclusively used in note phones)

 

I then rephrased the last sentence into this (because it wasn t clear I admit)

 

 

btw here s the cpu arguments in other terms:

A i7 2600k isn t that outdated yet compared to a 3770k or 4770k, yes it slower,  but it is still ok, we couldn t say that 10 years ago,

The same thing is happening on mobile, again for the argument that 1 year in mobile isn t as long as it used to be.

I m not saying there s no improvements, only there s less than it used to be.

 

Now,  nowhere did I say that improvements aren t great, only that they re way slower that they once where meaning you get less bang for your buck each year.

[Builder]

-snip-

Well it used to be all of them cheated. I gotta stick with the times

 

From the same article: "At worst, the device’s total memory usage never exceeded 60% of what ships with the platform but these are admittedly fairly light use cases."

 

He was referring to the move to 64-bit pointers and the associated memory leaks in your quote. Also I have an iPhone 5S but like I said I never open a lot of apps on it at a time.

 

With regards to Chrome being a Safari skin, that's not exactly the case. All the third party web browsers on iOS use the UIWebView function of Cocoa Touch. This essentially downloads the page completely before showing it to you, and they haven't allowed third parties so far to use the latest version of Nitro in anything but Safari but with iOS 8 that is changing.

 

It deletes your tabs though? He didn't reference that. You should submit a bug report or bring it to the Apple Store.

 

Still, with low clock speed and two cores, it manages to kick the ass of the Snapdragon 801, at least for now. The iPads have the A7 clocked a bit higher because they have larger batteries.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/5 He tested a bunch of other phones with the same benchmarks, still not sure what you're going for here. The iPhone 5S still beat most of them.

 

Unfortunately I cannot get an Exynos Samsung here because they give the US patrons the stock Qualcomm chip. I believe I'd have to buy it unlocked or even import it to use their eight core chip. Regardless of that, we're still kind of in the midst of a "core war" like the old Ghz war and whoever has more cores seems to be winning regardless of whether or not their chip performs well.

[LAwLz]

From the same article: "At worst, the device’s total memory usage never exceeded 60% of what ships with the platform but these are admittedly fairly light use cases."

Yes, in a light usage scenario 60% of the memory is used. Throw in a bunch of more stuff (like quite a few Safari tabs) and you will be right at 100% (or close to 100%, but iOS starts deleting stuff in RAM).

 

He was referring to the move to 64-bit pointers and the associated memory leaks in your quote. Also I have an iPhone 5S but like I said I never open a lot of apps on it at a time.

I don't see him mentioning any memory leaks. To me this just seems like Apple's hardware not getting with the times. It boggles my mind that they didn't go with 2GB for the iPad Air. Even if you argue that it uses a tiny bit more power (which can easily be countered by avoiding having to fetch the web pages over and over again) it still wouldn't matter on the iPad.

 

With regards to Chrome being a Safari skin, that's not exactly the case. All the third party web browsers on iOS use the UIWebView function of Cocoa Touch. This essentially downloads the page completely before showing it to you, and they haven't allowed third parties so far to use the latest version of Nitro in anything but Safari but with iOS 8 that is changing.

Eh... And your point? I'd call Chrome a Safari skin if it uses all the underlying components of Safari, but has a different GUI. That's the whole reason why Firefox isn't on iOS, because Mozilla want to use their own rendering engine and own JS engine. Apple doesn't let them. With Nitro the situation got even worse because now they are forcing third party browsers to use an inferior version.

 

It deletes your tabs though? He didn't reference that. You should submit a bug report or bring it to the Apple Store.

No the tabs aren't deleted but the webpage is, so I am forced to reload the website. It's such a waste.

 

Still, with low clock speed and two cores, it manages to kick the ass of the Snapdragon 801, at least for now. The iPads have the A7 clocked a bit higher because they have larger batteries.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/5 He tested a bunch of other phones with the same benchmarks, still not sure what you're going for here. The iPhone 5S still beat most of them.

The GPU benchmarks are good and I will admit that Apple has always put a great GPU in their SoCs (although the rest of the mobile GPU players have caught up at this point). The CPU benchmarks are so flawed I'd consider them worthless though, and I have already explained my reasoning for that earlier in the thread.

 

Unfortunately I cannot get an Exynos Samsung here because they give the US patrons the stock Qualcomm chip. I believe I'd have to buy it unlocked or even import it to use their eight core chip. Regardless of that, we're still kind of in the midst of a "core war" like the old Ghz war and whoever has more cores seems to be winning regardless of whether or not their chip performs well.

I wouldn't even bother trying to get it. The Exynos model of the Galaxy S 4 was awful. Cortex A15 at such high frequency is not suitable for a phone, and the coherency bus was broken so it wasted a ton of power every time it changed cluster. Speaking of changing cluster... It was also the worst possible implementation of big.LITTLE (cluster migration) and I wouldn't bother with that.

I agree that 8 cores wouldn't make sense if they were the same type of core (like in some of the MediaTek chips) but it makes perfect sense to me in big.LITTLE like what Samsung and Qualcomm are doing.

Speaking of Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 810 (hopefully) won't have any of the issues that plagued the first Exynos Octa. The latest Exynos octa (which they mostly use in their tablets) is still cluster migration but the bus is fixed and in tablets you won't run into the same power and heat issues so it should be fine in there.

[Builder]

I'm going to reply in a different way so it's clear what I'm replying to.

Yes, in a light usage scenario 60% of the memory is used. Throw in a bunch of more stuff (like quite a few Safari tabs) and you will be right at 100% (or close to 100%, but iOS starts deleting stuff in RAM). It doesn't delete it, it saves the state of the memory and closes the app while leaving the card open. When you reopen that app, it tries to reload the saved data as fast as possible but often times it's not fast enough.

 

I don't see him mentioning any memory leaks. To me this just seems like Apple's hardware not getting with the times. It boggles my mind that they didn't go with 2GB for the iPad Air. Even if you argue that it uses a tiny bit more power (which can easily be countered by avoiding having to fetch the web pages over and over again) it still wouldn't matter on the iPad. He mentions the issue with 64-bit pointers close to the bottom. I agree that the iPad should have had 2GB of RAM though I will also maintain that I have never noticed that much of a problem.

 

Eh... And your point? I'd call Chrome a Safari skin if it uses all the underlying components of Safari, but has a different GUI. That's the whole reason why Firefox isn't on iOS, because Mozilla want to use their own rendering engine and own JS engine. Apple doesn't let them. With Nitro the situation got even worse because now they are forcing third party browsers to use an inferior version. It might be a bit difficult to understand what I was trying to say, but my point was that up until now they haven't really been web browsers. They just implement UIWebView. Safari can actually render while the page is loading while the other ones cannot. One of the biggest changes in iOS 8 is a movement away from this. All the browsers are allowed to have their own rendering engine and the latest version of Nitro.

 

No the tabs aren't deleted but the webpage is, so I am forced to reload the website. It's such a waste. I've never experienced this. I'm sorry you're having a problem with it.

 

The GPU benchmarks are good and I will admit that Apple has always put a great GPU in their SoCs (although the rest of the mobile GPU players have caught up at this point). The CPU benchmarks are so flawed I'd consider them worthless though, and I have already explained my reasoning for that earlier in the thread. Well for application specific tests yes but he was using the same CPU benchmarks on all the phones.

 

I wouldn't even bother trying to get it. The Exynos model of the Galaxy S 4 was awful. Cortex A15 at such high frequency is not suitable for a phone, and the coherency bus was broken so it wasted a ton of power every time it changed cluster. Speaking of changing cluster... It was also the worst possible implementation of big.LITTLE (cluster migration) and I wouldn't bother with that.

I agree that 8 cores wouldn't make sense if they were the same type of core (like in some of the MediaTek chips) but it makes perfect sense to me in big.LITTLE like what Samsung and Qualcomm are doing.

Speaking of Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 810 (hopefully) won't have any of the issues that plagued the first Exynos Octa. The latest Exynos octa (which they mostly use in their tablets) is still cluster migration but the bus is fixed and in tablets you won't run into the same power and heat issues so it should be fine in there.

Now that that's over with.

 

I want a phone that runs a full Linux distro (not Google-raped Android) with an FPGA in a casing like the iPhone 6 supposedly will have. If they could give me hackable hardware like that I'd buy it from anyone. I'm already waiting for the next batch of Blackphones to come through because while I like the idea of Android I have personal issues with Google and their privacy policies and wish they would just make an unadulterated version of Android.