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Galaxy S 4 Dominates In Early Benchmark Testing 276

redkemper writes with an excerpt from BGR.com of interest to anyone in the market for a new phone: "Samsung's Galaxy S 4 might not offer much in the way of an exciting new exterior design, but inside, it's a completely different story. The retooled internals on the U.S. version of the Galaxy S 4 were put to the test by benchmark specialists Primate Labs and the results are impressive, to say the least. The Galaxy S 4 scored a 3,163 on the standard Geekbench 2 speed test, just shy of twice the iPhone 5's score of 1,596. That score was also good enough to top the upcoming HTC One, the Nexus 4 and the previous-generation Galaxy S III."
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Galaxy S 4 Dominates In Early Benchmark Testing

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  • funny thing is (Score:4, Insightful)

    by etash ( 1907284 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:29AM (#43212989)
    sgs 3 is better than iphone5 in that chart
    • Re:funny thing is (Score:5, Informative)

      by niftydude ( 1745144 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:39AM (#43213091)

      sgs 3 is better than iphone5 in that chart

      The international sgs 3 is better, the US sgs 3 isn't.

      I was never sure why samsung put a slower soc in the phones that went to the US.

      • Re:funny thing is (Score:5, Informative)

        by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:55AM (#43213239)
        The faster Samsung processor used in the international versions didn't work with the 4G LTE that we have in the States.
        • Re:funny thing is (Score:4, Interesting)

          by rjr162 ( 69736 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @11:29AM (#43214195)

          Faster in some senses.. the dual core did better in some areas than the quad-core (due to the faster clock speed even if it isn't a massive clock-speed jump). I have a Quad-Core international (since my wireless carrier doesn't have LTE and is going HSPA+ instead) vs some of the people I know who have the dual-core US one.. (one of which said they thought the screen on my international seemed clearer than their US one although I think that was in their head)

      • Re:funny thing is (Score:5, Informative)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @10:04AM (#43213313) Journal

        Qualcomm's "Snapdragon [wikipedia.org] has good in-package support for cellular flavors in common use in the US. As can be seen in the wikipedia list, that puts them in quite a few US-release phones, even from people like Samsung who have their own SoCs.

      • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        sgs 3 is better than iphone5 in that chart

        The international sgs 3 is better, the US sgs 3 isn't.
        I was never sure why samsung put a slower soc in the phones that went to the US.

        because you're(assuming) stupid enough to buy the shit US operators sell you on partial payment plans on their quirky networks they like to choose quirky tech for so that it's harder for you to switch operators and harder to buy phones from open market.

    • not better.

  • Great! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zhvihti ( 864974 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:31AM (#43213007)
    Considering this is the US version with Qualcomm chips, the results for the international one with Exynos should be even better.
    • by gutnor ( 872759 )
      Well that would be interesting to wait for the benchmark. The Exynos contains 2 set of 4 cores: 4 slower set for battery optimising and 4 faster for CPU intensive application. The speed difference may not be that important, by design, the battery should be the main difference between the 2 (with the 8-core being significantly better). That make sense btw, with modern phones, your main concerned is keeping it powered, not really CPU speed.
  • by TWX ( 665546 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:31AM (#43213011)
    I've had two smartphones now, the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream, and the Samsung Galaxy SII. It's not about the phone speed, it's about the applications and the connectivity. If my wife's Palm T|X was a phone and had the ability to synch to a server automagically like Android does with Google's applications, she'd probably still be using it. Having the web is nice, but having the e-mail, calendar, contact list, music player, e-book reader, camera, picture viewer, and calculator are what make the device so useful. For me, it's a tool first and foremost, and the toy gadgets aren't what make it why I carry it.
  • by SpaceMonkies ( 2868125 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:32AM (#43213015)
    The iPhone is definitely not cutting edge technology, despite what some people believe. The iPhone is more the tried and true stuff, although I think most people use it for the software, not the hardware. However, for those who like power and fun in their pockets, the S4 is the bomb.
    • by alen ( 225700 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:47AM (#43213165)

      the CPU and GPU in the iphone 5 were cutting edge for 2012.
      i'm playing Real Racing 3 and the graphics are about as good as the xbox

      MHz or GHz speed has never been a good predictor of actual processing power. Intel sold 4GHz CPU's 10 years ago. the 2GHz ones they sell now are A LOT faster

      cpu/gpu architecture and the having the software actually take advantage of the hardware features will give you better performance than paper specs

    • by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:51AM (#43213209)

      what's the killer app for increased CPU?

      why do I need such a powerful computation engine in my pocket? the main use I see is if it gets to be good enough to be a desktop replacement and I can just dock it to a big screen. But until then having more cpu or GPU isn't going to let be surf the internet faster or type e-mail faster or even give me longer battery life. THe existing ones already play HD movies so the frame rate threshold has been reached for highly satisfactory video.

      SO what's the killer app for increased CPU? playing halo? Nice but not a killer app for a cell phone I think. I just can't think of anything in terms of compuational horsepower that I would like my cell phone to do that it doesn't do now and for which the cell platform is the right place to do it. I need help with my imagination I guess.

      For me the thing I need on my cell phone is vastly more battery. Why? Well aside from the obvious of longer charge time, you could probably vastly increase the communication rate and reliability by broadcasting more power. You could certainly increase the amount of time you would be tempted to use video (battery consumers).

      • by alen ( 225700 )

        games?

        only reason to buy an iphone over android at this point is games. i play real racing 3 on my iphone 5 and the graphics are about as good as my xbox 360. ipad 4 has better GPU and will be slightly better.

        and if you have an apple TV you can output the game to your TV to make it like a real game console and that takes CPU power as well as a nice wifi router

      • I've got an old Nook Color (800MHz single-core A8) lying around, it's still perfectly OK for most everything I do on a tablet, except HD video (I don't game).

        I think OEMs are mis-aiming. Better battery, louder sound, more rugged design... would be more interesting to me than octo-core with bells on.

      • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @11:27AM (#43214183)

        what's the killer app for increased CPU?

        You won't ask those sorts of questions next time you're trapped in your car, upside down in a snowbank, and that Space Heater App is the only thing standing between you and grim death!

      • what's the killer app for increased CPU?

        Botnets controlled by criminals, of course. It's a growth industry!

      • SO what's the killer app for increased CPU?

        On the fly translation of spoken language, for one.

      • I'd take power/weight savings over processing speed any day in my phone. Wish Apple/Samsung would optimize for that.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This couldn't be more untrue. The newest iPhones always are in the top of the pack when it comes to CPU performance and they always have had cutting edge GPUs.

    • by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @10:38AM (#43213667) Homepage

      Actually, at around the time of iPhone 4, Apple started putting in some good specs. By the time the iPhone 5 came out it, was among the fastest phones. This is in direct contrast to the early iPhones which had tragically bad specs.
      I mean it seemed to me the were targeted at complete retards - people would show me their (gen 1) iPhone and say "look at how well you can browse the web". I could see how the UI of the browser was an improvement over my 3-year old PDAs (Axim X50v) browser, however trying to read on that half-VGA screen would give me instant headaches. Yes, my 3-year old PDA has twice the resolution and a faster CPU. In fact, even before that, my ancient (2003) Toshiba e805 had a 4" screen with full VGA resolution. Consider also the fact that the iPhone originally did not support apps, it should become apparent that the touch-friendly UI alone would not have given momentum to the iPhone release if it was not for marketing and fanboy-ism.
      And yet it is surprising that people would call the original iPhone e.g. as a "high resolution display" device. There were devices at least 2 years older with 3x the resolution (but Nokia was too stupid to make a phone back then based on the N770/N800), but they were "invisible" to people.
      After Apple opened a new market and everybody jumped in, then they started trying to compete on merit and not just style.
      Another reversal that has happened is that now iOS is the least innovative OS. Android - though I am still not a great fan - evolves quickly and I have seen UIs made from scratch (e.g. Swipe UI on Maemo/Meego) look like they are coming to us from the next decade (in look and functionality). Instead of a modern OS on retarded hardware Apple now offers modern (at least relatively) hardware on an aging platform. The only thing that hasn't changed is that you always get less functionality than the competition and you can't change the battery or add memory...

  • by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:37AM (#43213075) Journal

    http://www.androidauthority.com/galaxy-s4-not-cyanogenmod-support-174322/ [androidauthority.com]

    Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None. They've complained that the Galaxy models are too hard to keep working. The strange thing about it, Cyanogen works for Samsung on their Android Team.

    Question is, will that affect your decision to buy or not buy the Galaxy S4.

    • by alen ( 225700 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:49AM (#43213195)

      if i was to leave iphone for android it would be the S4 or the Note

      couldn't care less about rooting and tooting. its like the shade tree mechanics of 30 years ago. people have nothing better to do with their devices.

      • Personally, I'm not likely to buy another non-Nexus device. You can't trust Samsung to update the OS, and it's nice to be able to remove any custom Samsung software. Third-party ROM support is never guaranteed, and is often required for non-Nexus devices, even just to fix security vulnerabilities.

        • by alen ( 225700 )

          i was going to "buy" a free Galaxy S2 for my mother in law 2 months ago. main reason was that it was getting ICS and maybe even Jellybean.

          as far as the point updates, don't really care if my phone has 4.2.1 and the latest is 4.2.2. i update my iphone 5 to the latest ios when its released, but don't really see any difference. the one difference i saw was a bug where my phone wouldn't work with my car's USB except on locally stored music. it was fixed in the last month and now i can listen to spotify and pand

        • by rjr162 ( 69736 )

          Samsung has to be one of the best at actually updating. The issue I think you're seeing and wrongly blaming on Samsung is your CARRIERs lack of updating. Both my Galaxy S and Galaxy S 3 are unlocked units from Immix Wireless. They don't screw with the ROMs or anything else. My wife had a Verizon Fascinate (a Galaxy S phone) and while my Galaxy S was getting updates from Samsung fairly steadily and was at 2.4.3 IIRC before I went 3rd party ROMs, my wifes fascinate was still back on 2.3 (or at least 2.3.x).

          • The Galaxy S line is just 3 years old and can support 4.2.2 through CyanogenMod. It should be supported by Samsung for 3 years as well, I think. 2.3 is ancient (as Android versions go), and was out when the S line was still being sold. Admittedly, keeping an Android phone up to date with the latest version isn't that important for features because of overall flexibility, getting security updates is.

      • by Alter_3d ( 948458 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @10:08AM (#43213355)
        Unfortunately that means you will be stuck with the Android version that comes with your device until Samsung and your carrier decide to upgrade it. That takes a loong time after Google releases updates. I have a Galaxy SII running the latest version of Android (4.2.2), but if I had not rooted it and switched ROMs, it would be running 4.0.4.
        • by alen ( 225700 )

          so i miss out on google now? who cares

          the way android OS versions are buying something like the S2 which has ICS is perfectly safe from an application compatibility standpoint. ICS is at its peak installs now so it will be at least 2 years before good apps will require jellybean or something later

        • At this point in the Android game any device with 4.x is probably fine for most people. Future upgrades will not provide the same level of functionality improvements we've seen with past versions.

          If you are not like most people and like to run the latest and greatest OS version, the S4 may not be a good choice.
      • I can understand. I feel like most people hanging on rumors and press releases about the newest phone or operating system fail to realize that mobile phones are a hobby, not a necessity or something of great importance.

        Installing CM on my phone was fun, but honestly, it's still the same phone it was before, just with different standard backgrounds and a few apps that were bundled in with it. Jailbreaking my ipad was a bit more functional, but at the end of the day, I tinker with my devices because I
      • Rooting is nice (.hosts ad blocking, etc), but other than that, I agree....meh. No need for crazy custom firmwares.

    • by dc29A ( 636871 ) * on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:49AM (#43213199)

      http://www.androidauthority.com/galaxy-s4-not-cyanogenmod-support-174322/ [androidauthority.com]

      Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None. They've complained that the Galaxy models are too hard to keep working. The strange thing about it, Cyanogen works for Samsung on their Android Team.

      Question is, will that affect your decision to buy or not buy the Galaxy S4.

      The only reason I picked up a Galaxy S3 is because it was CM10 supported. 2 hours after purchase, warranty was voided and CM was running on it. So no CM, no sale.

    • Personally, I find the stock Samsung roms to be perfectly good. I've rooted my S3 and disabled a lot of the built-in Samsung apps, but apart from that, it's still running the latest official Samsung firmware. It does everything I want, so I see no reason to change for the sake of it. (In other areas/devices I'm an incorrigible modder, so this isn't just apathy, this is the 3rd party roms not being compelling enough to change).

      If I still have my S3 in a year or so when Samsung have stopped releasing updates

    • by rjr162 ( 69736 )

      No, because CM for the Galaxy line has been okay at best for a while now. Once they started getting into 9 some funky stuff happened, such as Spirit FM or whatever the radio app is called you had to use since the stock FM app would't work in CM 9. Issue was, EVEN IF YOU WERE USING HEADPHONES ANY AND ALL TIMES THE FM RADIO APP WAS IN USE, your external speaker could (and fairly often like mine DID) die. At first it sounded like it was blown, and then less than two days later it quit working at all.

      There was

    • Reading that link, they talk about not wanting to deal with Exynos. In the USA, however, we're going to get the Qualcomm Krait version. Qualcomm has been much better with releasing usable sources than Samsung. And Cyanogen works for Samsung USA, so it would seem to me that getting an SGS4 is a safe bet in the USA if you want Cyanogenmod.

    • by Riddler Sensei ( 979333 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @12:35PM (#43215035)

      CyanogenMod is posting across social networks that this is just the opinion of some of the devs, but is not the stance of project.

      Found on G+ just now:

      Let’s start with the simplest form of this: CyanogenMod does not pre-announce support or lack of support for devices. Ever. Even for the Nexus 4, we did not announce support until a nightly build was available. Further, any announcement regarding the ‘dropping’ of device support will be communicated via this Google+ page, Twitter, Facebook, our blog, or a combination of those; it will not be something buried in a forum post.

      This morning, a comment from a CM collaborator on XDA was taken to be as an ‘absolute’ in regards to support of the S4. He offered the opinion of four TeamHacksung maintainers, their frustrations and lack of interest in supporting the S4. What’s seemingly lost on those reading this is that his comments as an individual do not speak for CyanogenMod as an organization.

      As for the team’s stance on the S4, there isn’t one at this time, and most definitely won’t be one before the device is sold at retail.

      -The CyanogenMod Team

    • by Andy Dodd ( 701 ) <atd7@@@cornell...edu> on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @01:34PM (#43215815) Homepage

      Not entirely true.

      There are two major variants of the Galaxy S4 - Qualcomm and Exynos based. Similarly there are two major subvariants of the GS3 - again, Qualcomm vs. Exynos.

      The Qualcomm-based GS3s were very well supported thanks to Qualcomm having excellent reference source at CodeAurora.

      The Qualcomm-based GS4s will probably be OK because many of the Qualcomm GS3 maintainers aren't as pissed off at Samsung as the Exynos guys (including myself) are.

      The four primary Exynos4 maintainers (myself, Daniel Hillenbrand, Guillaume Lesniak, and Espen Fjallvar Olson - I may have missppelled thos slightly as we usually just go by IRC nicks) have all decided that we won't be touching any further Samsungs. We're all working with Nexus or Sony devices now. (Sony has done a MAJOR turnaround in terms of opensource support over the past year, or at least the Mobile division has.)

      This probably has little impact on the Qualcomm-based GS4s, but right now, the Exynos-based GS4s are without any prospective maintainers.

      Will a new maintainer step up? Possibly. Will they succeed without just saying "fuck this shit" and selling the phone for a different one? I personlly don't think so.

      It's a volunteer project so nothing is ever a surefire given, and collective decisions are rarely made - so far, they have only been made in regards to outdated hardware and newer versions of Android. (Such as Snapdragon S1-based phones ending at CM7).

      That said, if you look at the attitudes of developers, you can "get a feel" for how likely a phone is going to be well supported by CM.
      DISCLAIMER: THE BELOW IS MY PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT IN ANY WAY AN OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE PROJECT:
      Will the Qualcomm-based GS4s receive maintainer attention and continued support including M and stable builds? I'd be surprised if they didn't.
      Will the Exynos-based GS4s receive maintainer attention and M/stable CM builds? I'd be very surprised if they do.

  • by alen ( 225700 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:39AM (#43213095)

    holy crap

    is there any software that actually takes advantage of this? there are only a few games that take advantage of the iphone 5's graphical power

    not like most people are going to dump their S3 or iphone 5 and run out to buy the S4 just because it gets better numbers
    i know someone who is going to buy the Galaxy S3 this week if he gets if for $99 on T-Mobile. he doesn't need the S4's power and price

    • remember the screen has a much higher number of pixels, demanding a lot more computation (granted, in graphics, but still relevant for SoC)

    • I can't find any app which taxes my 2 year old Desire HD (Single core 1GHz Scorpion CPU, part of MSM8255 chipset). I think mobile processing has come to the same point as desktop processing; For 99% of the tasks, 2 years ago is more than enough (5 in desktop, really). The "new shiny" is for posers.
    • http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3848380/hawken-project-shield-exclusive-tegra-4 [polygon.com]

      Mind you, the above link is for Hawken on a Tegra 4, which this isn't using, but the point is that developers are working on bringing console-level titles to phones.

  • by SailorSpork ( 1080153 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:40AM (#43213097) Homepage
    ...those birds will look TWICE as angry on a Galaxy S 4 as they do on an iPhone 5? IN!
  • at least the S4 is going on sale next month
    for the next 6 months i have to read how the Tegra 4 is the most awesomenest mobile chip even though there aren't any products on sale that have it. but all i have to do is keep waiting and not buy anything else

  • oh that's right (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:46AM (#43213159)
    Wow, now it's fast enough to run Crysis 3! Oh wait...that's right, it's a phone. Apps are written for the slowest Android devices for the biggest marketability so that speed means nothing and does nothing but waste battery life. Maybe it can process photos faster with a built-in app or something faster but who cares? Most people run 3rd party apps the vast majority of the time. I would much, much, much rather see a doubling of the battery life than a doubling of the processor speed.
    • by swb ( 14022 )

      I don't think apps are written for the slowest device. My experience with Apple IOS and devices of mixed age is that over time the apps seem to target faster and faster CPUs, either by doing more things or adding new features.

      Every so often I grab an old iPhone 4 we use for a home phone and try to use Instacast and it about locks up updating 4-5 podcasts, yet it's like glass on my iPhone 5.

      • One of the benefits of Apple's walled garden approach (yes, we all know the perils of walled gardens, I love rooting and installing CM, too)

        Apple currently has less than a dozen total devices still supported. That's combined between all phones, pads and pod-touches (not counting pod-shuffles - they don't get apps.) On those, only 2 or 3 potential OSes are supported, with the current OS installed on over 60% of applicable hardware.

        This makes it very easy for app developers to optimize apps for the majorit

    • Wow, now it's fast enough to run Crysis 3! Oh wait...that's right, it's a phone. Apps are written for the slowest Android devices for the biggest marketability so that speed means nothing and does nothing but waste battery life. Maybe it can process photos faster with a built-in app or something faster but who cares? Most people run 3rd party apps the vast majority of the time. I would much, much, much rather see a doubling of the battery life than a doubling of the processor speed.

      Samsung claims the SIV has best-of-breed voice control. What they demoed looked very impressive, even though it might have been staged (indeed, it happened on a stage :D ).
      Regardless of whether the SIV demo was staged or not, the fact remains that good voice recognition requires a lot of processing power. Bear in mind that the voice recognition process must run in parallel to whatever app is being controlled, so more cores can come in handy.

    • by fa2k ( 881632 )

      Speed does mean something. My 2 year old Nexus S has frequent delays of 5-10 seconds. It seems slower than when I bought it, but I can't see any reason why Google would make their OS slower, so I have no idea why it's like that. If there is a delay of order 100 ms, it may be caused by frequency scaling and other power saving features, but multiple second delays would definitely be fixed by a faster CPU. There is also RAM, though. Hard to tell if it's swapping or running at full speed when it's all solid st

  • As long as we're going down the road of matching cores and RAM to that of nearly current desktop specs, why not nail down some standards for connecting peripherals? And no, I don't mean shitty proprietary bluetooth/wi-fi protocols. I mean a standard mini-usb dock with VGA, HDMI, DVI output and a few USB ports for a keyboard and rat. Something that can be implemented by the entire range of Android devices whether it's HTC, or Samsung, or Motorola. Otherwise, I see no point in phone with 4 damn cores and 3-4

    • You can get a dock for the Note that is compatible with the S3. It has a HDMI port and several USB ports. There are only two downsides: It costs around $80 to $100, and it doesn't necessarily work with USB ethernet.

      Oh, and with the S3, you can get a simple USB OTG cable to hook up a keyboard and mouse (using a hub). It also works with USB hard drives. When I connected my USB ethernet adapter, it fried the phone. Instant death. They replaced it under warranty, but something is very wrong with the desi

  • Given that the S4 has twice the cores of the iPhone5, this seems reasonable, if not a bit disappointing. I'd be curious to see some real-world benchmarks to see how actual apps fare, as they typically won't be making use of all 4 cores. For instance, while the S3 international flavor scores higher than the iPhone5 on this chart, there were many real world tests that the iPhone5 easily won.

    I'll be anxious to see real world tests and see how well the S4 is making use of all of the available cores.

  • Got a nexus.. so, whatever apps work on my Nexus will work on the 4.. but will it offer significantly better battery life?
  • I'd be more interested in the latency, responsiveness and touchscreen delay than raw CPU speed.
  • In shock news, it was revealed the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 phone is actually faster then the previous generation Galaxy S III.

    Glad they cleared that one up. :-)

    Bob.

  • The only feature that I really want in the S4 is the IR transmitter. There's nothing like having a remote control for all the TVs in the restaurant, primarily for using the off button.

  • My 15 months old iPhone 4S continues to be good enough. I'm not interested in the new Samsung, the new iPhone or the new anything.
    Maybe after two more hardware refreshes...

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