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Benchmarks Show Galaxy S8 With Snapdragon 835 Is a Much Faster Android Handset (hothardware.com) 82

Posted by BeauHD from the speed-racer dept.
MojoKid writes: Samsung recently launched the Galaxy S8 series of Android smartphones to much fanfare but only recently did the handsets begin to arrive in market for testing and review. Though the high-polish styling of the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ may or may not appeal to you, few would argue with its claims of significant performance gains and improved battery life. As it turns out, in deep-dive testing and benchmarking, the Galaxy S8 series is significantly faster than any other Android handset on the market currently, especially when it comes to graphics and gaming workloads. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor on board the GS8 is currently a Samsung exclusive, though it's expected to arrive in other handsets later this year. The Adreno 540 graphics engine on board the new Snapdragon chip is roughly 25% faster than the previous generation 820/821 series, though the chip is only about 10 percent faster in standard CPU-intensive tasks. Regardless, these are appreciable gains, especially in light of the fact that the new Galaxy S8 also has much better battery life than the previous generation Galaxy S7 series. The Samsung Galaxy S8 (5.8-inch) and Galaxy S8+ (6.2-inch) are expected to arrive at retail this week and though pricing is carrier-dependent, list for roughly $720 and $850 respectively, off contract.
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Benchmarks Show Galaxy S8 With Snapdragon 835 Is a Much Faster Android Handset More

Benchmarks Show Galaxy S8 With Snapdragon 835 Is a Much Faster Android Handset

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  • That is been the case all of my life.

    • http://bgr.com/2017/04/17/gala... [bgr.com]

      Old model iPhone smokes the latest androids any way you can measure it. The iphone 7 beats the G8 by more than the G8 beats the previous snapdragon. So rather than leapfrogging the Snapdragon keeps ramming headfirst into the iPhone's rear end.

      To be fair there is one spec the new G8 does win on, and that's straightup numberical benchmark using multi-core. it' wins by a small margin. But loses by a factor of 2 on single core processes. Since no one actually uses their pho

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Sit on my lap, sonny, while I tell you the story of the 386SX, a new processor with a disabled math coprocessor that was actually slower than an older 386 at the same clock speed...

      • As far as I can recall, neither the 386 nor the 386SX had a mathematical coprocessor built-in.
        The 386 had a full external 32-bit databus, the 386SX was 32 bits internally, with only 16 bits externally, so you only needed 2 8-bits-wide SIMMs instead of 4. The coprocessor was always external, 387 vs 387SX.
        With the advent of the 486, the 486DX had the coprocessor built-in, which the 486SX didn't have. Both had an external 32-bit bus.
        There was a mathematical coprocessor for the 486SX, the 487SX, which actually

  • Old (Score:5, Insightful)

    by youngone ( 975102 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @07:16PM (#54260501)
    The summary reads a lot like the PC magazines I used to read 20 years ago, where any tiny increase in performance was worthwhile.

    Thank goodness we're at the stage where any x64 processor from the last few years will be plenty good enough for most people, and benchmarks are largely meaningless

    I am looking forward to the day when it's the same with phones.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      The only one I bother with now, is does it come with a user removable battery. Trying to switch off a ringing smart phone is really annoying and seems to take forever. Ripping off the back and flicking out the battery is so much more satisfying and affirmative. Problem with data adding all sorts of things into a smart phone, it doesn't know when to STFU, switch off one thing, another kicks in, sometimes the fucking thing just refuse to switch off, you hold down that button and nothing, well, actually a whol

      • Ripping off the back and flicking out the battery is so much more satisfying and affirmative.

        I throw my S5 hard enough for the battery to fly out but not so hard that I break it... not so far at any rate. :)

      • I find "slide down from top", "tap do not disturb" to be a much nicer way to silence a phone. I can still use it for other stuff while it's silenced and unsilencing it is the same "flick/tap", and there's no need to wait for it to boot.

        Most of the time I don't even have to do that much, though. The phone is set to silence itself automatically during any meeting on my calendar.

      • There appears to be quite a few Motorola phones (all 5 that I've seen since 2012) in the G and X-series that aren't considered to have "user replaceable batteries", yet all you have to do is pry the back panel off with your thumbnail, and maybe remove a battery cover.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

        Really? You can't just push a button and have the ringing stop? You must have the most god-awful phone in existence. Or, you're a moron of extreme proportions.

    • My feeling is the GPU improvements mean more than CPU improvements nowdays.

      Then again, if the game AI needs to run on a GPU, and the graphics needs to run on a GPU, um, well, dang.

      I predict in 2 years we'll be buying AI cards in addition to our GPUs. If you're a gamer that is.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ranton ( 36917 )

        I predict in 2 years we'll be buying AI cards in addition to our GPUs. If you're a gamer that is.

        You may not need that "for gamers only" qualifier in a few years if AI becomes more ubiquitous in consumer applications. While its possible most if not all of that processing would be done in the cloud, there could certainly be a need for local deep neural network processing to run the personal assistant apps of the near future.

    • Re:Old (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Namarrgon ( 105036 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:35PM (#54260845) Homepage

      I recall a PC magazine article from 1981 questioning the value of these new 16 bit microprocessors - what did we need them for? WordStar and Visicalc ran perfectly well on a Z-80 with CP/M, so surely additional speed was pointless for most people.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bongo ( 13261 )

        And I remember Pournelle in Byte magazine questioning the need for pre-empive multitasking. :-D

        I guess, since the focus switched to phones, we've been waiting for phone CPUs to catch up to desktop ones, but that doesn't mean we don't need nor won't use more power. It is just a transition phase.

      • I recall a PC magazine article from 1981 questioning the value of these new 16 bit microprocessors - what did we need them for? WordStar and Visicalc ran perfectly well on a Z-80 with CP/M, so surely additional speed was pointless for most people.

        Not all growth is infinite. Desktops currently offer more processing power than most laptops, yet laptops are more popular. At some point the tech reaches 'good enough', and speed is no longer the major priority

        • Until new and more-demanding uses become possible, then common. The point is, our needs tend to grow to match available processing power, so as faster laptops are created, more powerful software will be made available to use it, and laptop users will come to demand the new capabilities (which were previously available on desktops but not worth trading away mobility). And since some industries will be demanding much more CPU power for a very long time yet, it's likely that overall growth will continue for so

          • Until new and more-demanding uses become possible, then common. The point is, our needs tend to grow to match available processing power, so as faster laptops are created, more powerful software will be made available to use it .

            Such as?
            Sure a small percentage of users use more powerful apps, but most users use email, browsing, facebook etc, stuff that still works well on 10 year old hardware.
            Phones are reaching that point the PCs got to in about 2005 when processing power no longer mattered for most people, and other things became more important to buyers. In fact up until 6 months ago I was still using my old laptop from 2007 until it finally gave up on me.

            • Games are the obvious thing to point to, and popular applications like photo and video editing, VR is becoming a thing, but there's also an entire field of neural-networks developing right now - speech and picture recognition, behavioral prediction - which is very processor-intensive. And future applications we don't know much about yet - lightfield video promises to suck down any resources we can find.

              Sure you can run legacy apps on legacy hardware, but new hardware enables new apps that require that new h

              • And a big reason you can get away with relatively old hardware today is that a lot of the new & intensive work has been offloaded to massive server arrays, where any cheap phone with a network link can use it.

                Exactly which is why once you reach 'good enough' people stop caring. I think we have reached that point with mobile devices. (if you take China as an example, powerful devices from Apple and Samsung are losing market share to the likes of Oppo and Vivo who make 'good enough' versions of very similar devices.

                Which is fine for some things, but I also see a growing preference for local storage and processing rather than sending your every habit to the cloud. Maybe CPUs will soon be powerful enough to run a genuinely personal assistant entirely locally...

                But why would you? It'll cost more and perform worse.

                • Exactly which is why once you reach 'good enough' people stop caring.

                  Sure, but that doesn't mean the demand for more power isn't there, it's just coming from other people - the server owners, for example, but also people who play games and all the others I mentioned. The many people who don't care about faster hardware will eventually end up with it anyway, when they next replace their hardware, and now software vendors can target a more powerful platform. Not everyone plays demanding 3D games, but everyone's GPUs got faster anyway.

                  But why would you? It'll cost more and perform worse.

                  You may not care to - but the demand is the

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm looking forward to something....like a PC of phones.

      Open standards, floss friendly, no walled garden. Maybe even 3rd party modular hardware upgrades. That'd be real swell.

    • where any tiny increase in performance was worthwhile

      Back then a tiny increase in performance was a major leap. Yeah adding 33MHz now seems silly, like a bug in your dynamic clocking routine. Back then it was 100% improvement in performance.

    • The summary reads a lot like the PC magazines I used to read 20 years ago, where any tiny increase in performance was worthwhile.

      Thank goodness we're at the stage where any x64 processor from the last few years will be plenty good enough for most people, and benchmarks are largely meaningless

      I am looking forward to the day when it's the same with phones.

      That day is now. The media/marketing might be hyping latest and greatest, but I'm starting to see more people opt for cheap and cheerful 'good enough' phones over these overpriced flagship devices. I recently bought an Oppo F1S to replace my old Note5. It cost 1/4 the price of the new S8 and is good enough for what I need (it actually is a really good phone). I know at least three other people in my circle that have made similar choices.

  • Incremental improvements... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by drew_92123 ( 213321 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @07:19PM (#54260507)

    That's all they're making, not because they can't do better, rather there's not much profit in it... All of humanity is being held back by greed. If not for greed medical science would have already advanced our average life spans well into the triple digits with immortality just around the corner... but nooooooo..... we're all gonna die young because of a few greedy pricks.

    • i do believe you are 100% correct there.

    • What do you think drives humanity forward?

      Altruism is a fine thing, but can you eat it? Will it keep the rain off if you?

      Virtually every advancement in human history, including fire and the club, is a direct result of greed.

    • What possible reason is their for them to do significantly better? They are a business and need to be profitable or they cease to exist, if that is greed then sure. Most would call it common sense and survival.

    • That's all they're making, not because they can't do better, rather there's not much profit in it... All of humanity is being held back by greed. If not for greed medical science would have already advanced our average life spans well into the triple digits with immortality just around the corner... but nooooooo..... we're all gonna die young because of a few greedy pricks.

      Citation needed.

      We don't know what we could have been discovered.

      I don't like consumerism and the current dominating corpratocracy either, but even if we suspect that profit motives are holding us back, we do not have crystal balls into alternative realities to put numbers like that out there as fact. But I 100% agree that there are people we could've saved from dying if we cared about people over $

  • Still slower than iphone 7 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @07:27PM (#54260545)

    Tested for real world usage and its slower than an iphone 7 https://youtu.be/OX4JucpvbJM

    • And me without mod points. Mods!

    • Re: Still slower than iphone 7 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In the real world, people don't load apps one after another like that.

      Try this speed test, send an email with two attachments. Or this one, set an mp3/acc as a ring tone. Or sync your phone via nfc with a Bluetooth speaker.

      • What the test shows is that the apple hardware is ahead of the, well, every else hardware, they're all using qualcomm chips there though. Their CPUs and OS load apps faster and do more than what the latest android platform is doing.

        Would I get an iPhone? No, everything I do, all the apps I've bought, email, everything I've done, it's all tied into android.

        When it comes to CPU and app switching though, (And that's a lot of what you are doing), is going into your phone for a task and maybe doing something els

    • Re: (Score:3, Troll)

      by gravewax ( 4772409 )
      that is your idea of real world usage? WTF? are you on acid while using your phone?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's not performance testing but I'm glad people think it is because it keeps me in business. There are two fundamental problems with it. First, no one uses their phones like that. You don't launch Netflix and then immediately switch to another app, you launch Netflix and watch Netflix. I don't care if Netflix takes half a second longer to load as long as my movie doesn't stutter when my wife messages me 100 different pictures of my son eating popcorn with his playdate. That's real world usage.

      Second

    • real world usage

      I don't think you know what this term means.

  • Eheheh... show me (but aim away from my face).

    Apparently, it's virtually the same battery design [sammobile.com].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ranbot ( 2648297 )

      Agreed... and I want to know how those batteries hold up 1-2 years from now. A battery that is constantly drained and recharged to the max will lose long-term effectiveness. Cell phone manufacturers use their OS to create "minimum" and "maximum" battery charges that will conserve the battery's life time, but these out-of-the-box battery life comparisons don't reflect long-term battery life.

      • IIRC, the Verge claims that the battery life is just meh, but that the overall power design is supposed to allow it to hold 95(?)% of it's original charge (at full cap) after two years.

        I think they're all just lying about everything at this point, because nobody can really test them properly.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ranbot ( 2648297 )

          IIRC, the Verge claims that the battery life is just meh, but that the overall power design is supposed to allow it to hold 95(?)% of it's original charge (at full cap) after two years.

          I think they're all just lying about everything at this point, because nobody can really test them properly.

          ...and if 2 years later you discover they were lying about the battery life it's far too late to do anything about it.

          But, FWIW, my wife and I both bought Samsung S5's about 2 years ago and the batteries are still holding up well. So, maybe they aren't lying...if you trust them to keep consistent battery/power management design 3 generations later [and not explode].

  • So, what about the S8 with Samsung's own Exynos 8895 10nm octa-core?? They are doing the S8 with that SoC too....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Holi ( 250190 )
      Yeah but only for the eurotrash outside the US.

      I kid, I am just jealous that Motorola keeps the Exynos chips out.

  • Have they checked by renaming the apk etc... ?

  • It's not like it has:
    A bigger screen for an easier to use phone,
    Better battery life with less charging,
    Moe memory for less swapping to Flash,
    Replaceable flash because it wears out,
    A keyboard, because I can't type well on a screen, because I use my thumbs for ridged backing (like when you peel a potatoes.)
    A better user interface, because you still can't do as much with your phone as a computer from the 1900s,
    A more durable phone, we drop them,
    A matte screen because glossy is stupid outdoors,
    A better lens on

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