After the buzz quickly died down for the Samsung Galaxy S5; Samsung, their followers and their critics quickly moved on to ‘the next big thing’ – the Galaxy Note 4. A couple years back, Samsung, single handedly, created the new Phablet niche, and to this day they are the ONLY ones to really understand it and cultivate it with their Note series. The other manufacturers simply make a big display and its immediately called a Phablet – they are close to a tablet ONLY in size, not functionality. The real experience comes from the siloed S-Pen and accompanying software to take advantage of that stylus…so each fall now, we wait and see what new Galaxy Note specifications will be thrown at us.
One of the biggest things we look at is the processor that is included in the device – the Note 4 will see the usual two renditions. The first one is for the U.S. customers and will contain the newest Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 – because it plays ‘nice’ with our 4G LTE network. The second model contains Samsung’s own ‘home grown’ Exynos Octa-Core 5433 processor (N910C) that was recently benchmarked by AnTuTu and finally broke the 40,000 score barrier.
This new Exynos Processor finally moves to the 64-bit class with four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores that implement the ARMv8-A instructions set, whereas the Snapdragon 805 is still using 32-bit Krait 450 cores. This new Exynos chipset also brings to us a new generation GPU – the Mali-T760…the Snapdragon also uses their next generation Adreno 420 GPU.
The Exynos chipset come out ahead on the Snapdragon 805 in CPU power as evidenced by the AnTuTu chart shown below. It cannot only use all eight cores simultaneously if needed, it also benefits from faster access to RAM. When it comes to the QHD display found on the Galaxy Note 4, the new Mali-T760 has an edge over the new Adreno 420. The score already is very impressive, but we must also keep that Android 4.4 is not optimized for the new instruction set used in the Exynos and for the QHD display resolution. Android L will bring a whole new ballgame – 64-bit ARMv8 with new instructions with more registers and the new ART runtime in Android L will allow us to see a free bump in performance of our apps without the developer doing anything.
Please hook up with us on our Google+ Page and let us know if you feel that the U.S. market is losing out in this deal…a 32-bit Snapdragon quad-core versus a 64-bit Exynos octa-core…as always, we would love to hear from you.