Samsung more or less shoots themselves in the foot with a machine gun when they implement Quad-HD as their display. There's no reason to push 500 PPI and wreck your GPU performance. You're sacrificing usability for marketing and that's too bad. They did this with their Tab S Wifi lineup, I had one for a brief while. The problem was that it was noticeably sluggish, despite having a beautiful display.
It would be interesting to see what the decision making process was at Samsung. It is possible that the direction was set by a bunch of marketing fools. More PPI might be of use when GOU hardware catches up but when it noticeably impacts performance it is pretty stupid. The question the pm becomes is this a software or hardware performance problem. In the end this is the unanswered question in this forum, are the bad results hardware or software related on these Android platforms.
One of the reasons why I like Apple is because they don't necessarily play a numbers game with specs. A series processors has always been dual core, never gave into the quad and octa marketing schemes.
Apple will eventually go quad core for the CPUs when the time is right. They simply took the option of dedicating a lot of die space to the GPU and dedicated hardware. Take one look at the microphotography of the A8 die and you will realize just how little space is taken up by the actual CPUS in these SoC. Quad core processors shouldn't be looked at negatively, it is the stupid marketing that should be seen as a problem.
In the end cores are about managing thermals while maintaining performance. When performance increases via clock rate bumps, use more power than adding more cores for a given performance level, Apple will add those cores. It is tricky because adding more cores doesn't improve the performance of every app which is probably why Apple spent so much time selling Grand Central Dispatch and other technologies that help spread workloads across processors.
Their camera has been a perfectly adequate 8 megapixels, not caring about 16 to 40 (lumia) megapixels on other usually inferior cameras. And now with the iPhone Plus they're satisfied with 1080p while competitors will continue to wreck usability to push indistinguishable resolutions.
8mega Pixels is a compromise, like all engineering, that tries to balance the state of the art with the physical reality of the device. If you can maintain quality more pixels really is an advantage, just one look at what pros can do with a high end DSLR should highlight that. The problem is people shouldn't expect DSLR level performance out of a cell phone.
As a side note I was in to photography in my younger years. During that time I saw all sorts of silver based initiatives from 110 cameras, disc cameras and the various 35 mm point and shoots. Few of those cameras could hold a candle to the iPhone today and frankly they where at times expensive cameras. Basically you get a point and shoot camera with the iPhone for free that far exceeds the quality of these old antiques.
[quite]
And of course you'll get legions of android fans gloating that Apple gimps their phones, clearly never using phone themselves.
[/quote]
That is certainly the case. Using one certainly is a good way to sell more iPhones. However we shouldn't dismiss every concerned raised by Android users. Sometimes the wall gardened / locked down nature of iOS devices is a problem. I balance that in a couple of ways.
First; by acknowledging that I always want my cell phone to be working.
Second; to satisfy my desire to tinker i buy other hardware be it a microprocessor, Linux box or a Mac. Sometimes self control and a little diversion solves a lot of problems with reliability.
Every single Apple iOS product i've ever owned has performed better than the android counterparts by a significant margin.
Never owned an Android device! I guess I'm not that much of a geek.
The thing with Android, beyond its obvious ripoff of Apple is that why put up with such a comprimise when there is BSD and Linux to shove on these platforms. Let's face it if you want truly open either of those two are better options than a messed up Linux/Java hybrid (Android) that is more about marketing and spying. I still don't see the value in tying up a cell phone with a custom Linux install as some do. I want that cell phone to work for me all the time and frankly that is what you get with iPhone.
I call bs on this if you are going to do a real comparison than you do it with the Qualcomm's snapdragon 805 which is on the note 4! The exynos5 is on the note edge! Do a real comparison this was a joke!
<div class="quote-container" data-huddler-embed="/t/182670/samsung-galaxy-note-4-delivers-poor-graphics-performance-vs-apple-iphone-6-plus/40#post_2613032" data-huddler-embed-placeholder="false"><span>Quote:</span><div class="quote-block">Originally Posted by <strong>lukei</strong> <a href="/t/182670/samsung-galaxy-note-4-delivers-poor-graphics-performance-vs-apple-iphone-6-plus/40#post_2613032"><img src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" class="inlineimg" alt="View Post"/></a><br/><br/><br />
I suggest you look into the various anti competitive action related cases that show how Intel kept AMD down</div></div><p> </p>
Which has nothing to do with the accuracy of my post, and like most people making the claims ignore AMD's own failings.
No company is perfect and frankly Intel has screwed often but gets a free pass from industry. However anti competitive practices have harmed AMD greatly and in some case have lead directly to some of its failings.
AMD had technological leads and was making upwards of up to a billion in profits around 98-00. But from 01-05 and today
They had terrible management, choosing to continuously fund development of unnecessary fab facilities, despite being explicitly warned against it.
Fabs are very important whe you competition is Intel.
As for management I have to agree that at times it looked like a three ring circus staffed by idiots. That however is sadly common today in the Management of American companies. There is a strong belief in management circles that you don't need to understand tech to manage it. Frankly AM d has been able to recover, across the river from where I live Kodak use to be "THE" company and it is now just an embarrassment. Kodak wasd destroyed by professional managers that couldn't grasp the changing world around them.
Had zero focus as a company. They were involved in memory, in logic, in microprocessors, communication products ect.... with almost no talent to properly spread across, resulting in shortages.
When Intel became resurgent with the core 2 duo's...Did AMD strike back? Did AMD pour it's all into out competing Intel in the face of potential anti trust action? NO. They bought ATI for 5 billion and for years afterwards integrated as well as Sprint Nextel did.
I can actually make a good argument that AMD wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the AMD purchase. In fact I see it as evidence that at least one person at AMD realized where tech was going in the future. Further ATI broke AMD away from the idea that they had to do production in house.
Then when AMD finally did get back to work it delivered two underperformers in Barcelona and later Bulldozer.
They also delivered Brazos which is clearly a better product than Intelsat ATOM. Their APUs are arguably better chips for many uses also mainly dupe to the ATI buy.
[ quote]
And worst of all, AMD is it's own worst enemy. AMD has ALWAYS had this pseudo pleasure of being a #2, even when it was prime position to take #1
[/quote]
AMD was never in a position to take #1. Not even close really.
But of course Blaming Intel is so much easier so most people stick with that.
No people just aren't willing to deny that Intel engaged in harmful activities that impacted AMD. Further we don't want to dwell on just the negatives, AMD has done fairly well with many of its intitiaives.
Right now, Apple is unmatchable in mobile semiconductor design. Only Intel comes close, but their insistance on using their own GPU designs is a limiting factor.
nVidia is trying with Project Denver, but a 25W TDP is insane.
The benefit of this is that A7 and A8 powered devices should serve their owners for quite a long time.
And, TBH, I get the feeling that Apple's semiconductor team is seeking to compete with Intel's "big iron", so to speak, not their Atom chips. The A7 took a lot of features from Haswell, and the A8 leapfrogs it with h.265 support.
Not saying we'll see a Mac Pro with an ARM chip any time soon, but the question becomes...when an Ax chip (or a pair) delivers "good enough" OS X performance, will we see them, in consumer grade products? Because I don't think Windows compatibility is nearly as important as it once was, and Microsoft has a very nice, very nearly feature complete version of Office 2013 that runs on ARM thanks to Windows RT...which I'm sure Satya would love to sell to Mac ARM users to recoup development expenses.
I am an Excel power user who doesn't use a mouse, and I think the fact that an Apple keyboard is so different and the keyboard shortcuts are limited has been an impediment to faster adoption
Rather than asking for examples and then shooting them down over whatever nonsense you can throw up as a defense against the facts, why don't you just run through the top games listed in the iTunes App Store and compile your own list of major games that don't exist on Android and/or aren't playable on android (like the top tile in both iTunes and Google Play: "Five Nights at Freddies," which for some reason doesn't run right on your Nvidia Shield, which nobody else bought.)
Seriously, if iPhone were Playstation and Android were Xbox, this would not even be a challenge and Microsoft would be giving up on its games franchise. Everyone knows Android has little more than IAP garbage-ware, and most of that looks like crap on various Android hardware experiments.
When Metal came out, AnandTech wrote that Metal would be used by 'the kinds of games that don't exist on Android.' What do you think they could have possibly meant?
Seriously, you sound like the curator of the Creation Museum trying to spread the idea that most people want complicated beta crap that works like a PC from the late 1990s. You are wrong, obviously. People with money have spoken, and they're not lining up for Nvidia Shields and Galaxy S5s. You can insist that there is a healthy ecosystem for Android all you want, but who do you think you're fooling? Yourself?
Heavens above, calm down with the spitting vitriol Dan. The only point being made was that a lot of this graphical power is unnecessary for the majority of games on any platform. Yes, iOS has some nice games with high end graphics, and they'll be even better with Metal enhancements, but the higher end Android devices like the Note 4, and the Shield could almost certainly run them at a reasonable standard too, the graphical power is just icing, much like the original Xbox had over the PS2, or the PS3 had over the X360. You're throwing out benchmark facts like they actually mean anything, when they're all so powerful that any advantage on either side is almost incidental. What matters more is whether the games get made for the platforms, and it's here that iOS has a notable advantage with mindshare and a healthier app/game ecosystem.
If the benchmarks were reversed then you'd be saying they don't matter a jot, so by all means report them, but this basking in the warm glow of graphical benchmarks is a little lame. And attacking dissenting opinion with speculative "whatever nonsense you can throw up" arguments in the comments while flitting your argument between the Note 4 and "various Android hardware experiments" is, as ever, not classy.
Both the Note 4 and the iPhone 6 have more graphical power than the majority of users will ever use.
Using a PenTile arrangement isn't necessarily a black-mark. The most color accurate and strongest performing smartphone display yet tested is in fact an OLED using that diamond-pattern PenTile screen. In addition if OLED's were as inherently inefficient as you say Apple would not choose one for their Apple Watch would they?
The Samsung Note might be a relatively poor performer with gaming just as DED claims but if so I don't think you can blame it on inefficient and poor display
LG's OLED doesn't use PenTile. They also have an OLED screen higher resolutionn than Samsung.
The high subpixel count in PenTile arrangement needs to be discounted since they need more subpixels to make the same color, say for text.
Apple Watch is said to use LG display.
As for color accuracy, the DisplayMate article mentioned that the Samsung screen is accurate (only) in certain mode. But they didn't mention if that mode runs color correction software and consume more power. If you run color correction software, it's no longer comparing display hardware. You get better color accuracy on any other screen running the appropriate color correction software.
I tried the iPhone 6 last week for the first time. Boy, does that screen look noticeably inferior to the 1080x1920 screens which have been available on comparable Android and Windows Phone devices for multiple years. I guess my eyes have adjusted to higher-quality screens over time.
Funny, I have a 2048 x 1536 display in my iPad, one of the most color accurate displays ever shipped, and yet the iPhone 6 still beats it. Perhaps resolution isn't everything?
I will say that the Note 4 display on the demo units at best buy are something else. Are they much better than the Plus screen? No, but they are probably the best mobile screen I've ever seen. Bright, black blacks, crazy viewing angles, and sharp even when 6 inches away. More power efficient apparently as well.
I didn't think that tech would ever match LCDs but it has. I really think the iPhone 7 will have an OLED screen.
If you don't 3D game on your phone, it's pretty great. If you do, you'd be better off with a 1080p phone until SOCs catch up.
I dont know about the Nexus 4, but I have the iphone 6 and 6+ and the screen is absolutely stunning. Pixels stay clear even when seen from a angle.
"Flagship Android devices can run graphics intensive games as well."
No. No, they can't.
1. The most graphics intensive games don't ship on Google Android. e.g. Infinity Blade III (Google Android finally got Epic Citadel last year) and Zen Garden 2. The benchmarks clearly demonstrate exactly the opposite; namely that even flagship Android devices can't run the most graphics intensive games available for Apple iPhone.
I care more about user experience than benchmarks. Apple's problem isn't hardware where no one can touch them right now. It's the software that needs work. As much as Steve Jobs said Apple was a software company I still think hardware is where they've really excelled. I'd love to see Apple take a year and really refine and polish iOS. Fix the bugs. Take some of what they've done in Yosemite from a UI perspective and bring that to iOS. Especially the dark theme. There's not much missing feature wise (though I'd love to see Siri opened up to 3rd party developers) so it's a good time for a version of Snow-iOS. Maybe that's what iOS 8.5 or 9 will be.
The user experience of iOS is tied directly to GPU performance because everything on the screen is drawn with hardware acceleration.
On Android, not so much. It's laggy and thin feeling like Windows, and its users generally don't care because they don't appreciate that level of attention to detail. That's why they buy phones with an ASP of $215.
It's like arguing to somebody who buys 20 chicken McNuggets for $5 why food cooked to order by a chef is better, when all they really care about is enough food to make them feel stuffed but costing only $5, with the "choice" of sauce.
When you say iOS devices are fast enough and the real problem is software, are you even aware of how transparent and silly that is? iOS devices should be as fast as apple can manage at an affordable price point, and the software gets much better every year. Neither is true for android. Updates come and users mostly can't avail themselves of them.
The whole benchmark test is a waste of time. The average user doesn't seem a difference in performance from one phone to the next, so it's only good for stirring the pot for the tech geeks. Of course the Apple A8 will outperform phones that use hype and fool the fake tech geeks who actually aren't that smart into thinking their phone is better than it really is.
I just want to also mention that Samsung fan-geeks always mention how Apple likes to advertise features such as a "retina display" for a display that's not even 1080p, or wasn't even 720p at the time of release, but they'll go on a rant about how their phone has an octa-core graphics processor (for those who don't have much of a brain, that's eight cores), a quad core processor that runs slower than Apple's A8 processor, and then talk about that QHD screen that's pure hype because it's overkill on the device.
So let me get this straight... A retina display is stupid marketing. But octa-core processors, quad-core processors, and QHD screens aren't, even though that octa-core processor is a waste of cores, just like the quad-core processor, and just like that QHD screen with it's overkill in regards to the amount of pixels it has compared to what a human eye can actually distinguish. Good thing I have the logic to stick with an Apple made product.
Heavens above, calm down with the spitting vitriol Dan. The only point being made was that a lot of this graphical power is unnecessary for the majority of games on any platform. Yes, iOS has some nice games with high end graphics, and they'll be even better with Metal enhancements, but the higher end Android devices like the Note 4, and the Shield could almost certainly run them at a reasonable standard too, the graphical power is just icing, much like the original Xbox had over the PS2, or the PS3 had over the X360. You're throwing out benchmark facts like they actually mean anything, when they're all so powerful that any advantage on either side is almost incidental. What matters more is whether the games get made for the platforms, and it's here that iOS has a notable advantage with mindshare and a healthier app/game ecosystem.
If the benchmarks were reversed then you'd be saying they don't matter a jot, so by all means report them, but this basking in the warm glow of graphical benchmarks is a little lame. And attacking dissenting opinion with speculative "whatever nonsense you can throw up" arguments in the comments while flitting your argument between the Note 4 and "various Android hardware experiments" is, as ever, not classy.
Both the Note 4 and the iPhone 6 have more graphical power than the majority of users will ever use.
Get real. The only thing either of you said in your "dissenting opinions" was that nobody should be caring about facts--particularly any measurable benchmarks--because speed doesn't matter and whoever cared about how well their phone performed anyway?! Hand waving nonsense.
iOS devices have always had a performance edge apparent in the UI, and the few android flagships that stand to distract attention away from the majority of outdated junk that makes up the bulk of the android platform have always pushed stats as the reason the minority of "Power users" needed to buy a new one every 4 months.
And just as with a PC, the main reason cited for having high specs on your android phone was to play games and serious apps, because android itself did a terrible job of using that horsepower to do anything else, like accelerate the UI.
What Apple is doing is creating a super fast platform that will have a 64-bit floor with Metal enhanced GPU and GPGPU. iOS already has the big games and the big apps (like GarageBand and iMovie, which are free for ios and unmatchable at any price for android).
Samsung et all are playing skate to where the puck was. That's why the new Samsung Alpha looks exactly like an iPhone 5 and most bundled apps look like ios 6. At this point, we are at the threshold where mass defection begins, just like it happened from windows to macs among Linux users, then programmers, then everyone with any business to do. Every windows PC maker has been scrambling to copy MacBook Air since 2012 as they circle the drain. Same with android. Will be the cheap option but will increasingly matter less and less.
I call bs on this if you are going to do a real comparison than you do it with the Qualcomm's snapdragon 805 which is on the note 4! The exynos5 is on the note edge! Do a real comparison this was a joke!
Thanks for the advice. The problem is that the snapdragon version isn't shipping yet. So we will have to wait for that to happen to address that story. Also, Metal benchmarks are not shipping yet either.
The real point is that cnet confuses the two chips for consumers, and that Samsung's own chips are (as you note) inferior to Qualcomm rather that superior (like Apple's own designs).
You can discount the Exynos Note 4 as being a lower performing version, but a more astute observation would be to look at that and ask yourself: why?
Android and Samsung fans like to make a big deal about the fact that Samsung LSI fabs Apple's chips. So why are Apple's A7/A8 so much better than the chips Samsung builds for its own highest end flagship?
Well this article was a waste of energy since a majority of major markets get the snapdragon 805 chipset. This articles benchmarks are based on the Exnyos chipset. As you can see the galaxy S5 with snapdragon 801 (slower chipset than note 4) has numbers MUCH closer to the iPhone 6. I expect the note 4 with snapdragon 805 to be very similar to the iPhone 6 :-/ nice try though.
I think the point is that Samsung is still dependent upon Qualcomm. Apple is designing dual-core processors that run as fast as Qualcomm's quad-core processors and are more power efficient. Samsung is designing double quad-core (which is what "octa-core" really is) big.LITTLE processors that are slower and less power efficient than Qualcomm's. So yes, Samsung can ship a Note 4 that holds its own against the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but they are enriching Qualcomm in doing so.
So when people point out that Apple is dependent upon Samsung (a competitor) for displays and chip fabs, it's worth pointing out that Samsung is also dependent upon a competitor. I'm sure they'd rather use their own designs. After all, Xiaomi and Lenovo can use a Qualcomm chip just as easily as Samsung and match its performance. Apple likely has some tricks up its sleeve if it needs to ramp up processing speeds. Heck, the A8 still has 1GB of RAM. Boosting it to 2GB alone might improve performance noticeably. Plus they could ramp up the processing speed, and can optimize iOS for 4 cores. IOW, they have lots more room for performance advancements right now.
If you look carefully, you can see that the table has results of the last iteration of the Note 3 running the Snapdragon CPU. It does quite well against the just-released iPhone 6 Plus, seemingly even beating it in a couple of the tests. It also outperforms the Note 4 shown here. As if Samsung is going to release a Note 4 which is slower than its predecessor.
Nearly everyone reading this is going to see/buy the Note 4 using the Snapdragon, not the benchmarked octa-core Samsung CPU. Considering the new Snapdragon CPU is both faster and more powerful than then Note 3, I think the Qualcomm Note 4 benchmarks will be much closer to the iPhone than shown in this article. Heaven forbid, the Samsung may beat it. Obviously the author gets a lot of pleasure from the superior performance of the Apple CPU, but I think the 'opponent' is a straw-man: Samsung will not take this octa-core CPU to major markets.
So I wouldn't be counting chickens just yet.
By definition, Apple is already beating the next generations of Snapdragon, simply as the A Series SOC are designed to balance performance and power consumption. This is a area that Androids generally throw really large battery capacities at to support high clock rates, usually double that of Apple. More to the point, and forgotten in this, Apple is designing its processors in coordination with its software features, whereas Qualcomm is designing for a general Android market and OS that Google controls.
So next generation, Apple drops to 14 Nm, as does Qualcomm, and all of the sudden, Apple gets to choose from either higher performance with the same battery life, similar performance with extended battery life, or more likely customer options in between, all in the same industry leading iPhone package, and all while getting the savings of large volumes at its chosen fabs. Meanwhile, all of the top Android OEM's are running Snapdragon, and in a competitive market, Qualcomm is making the profits on the SOC's, not the OEM's, and Samsung is increasingly under pricing pressure, so it becomes harder and harder to keep up with Apple A Series price/performance/power advantage. At the same time, Apple is increasingly capable of building its own imaging module's and sometime in the future, even the imagers.
This leads to margin compression for Samsung and the other leading OEM's, all while being eaten from below by the Chinese OEM's. Now I would single out Sony for moving into the classic iPhone form factor and getting many things right, something that Samsung has been unable to do.
The bottom line from this is that Apple is gaining significant design experience in ARM, SOC's, and soon GPGPU's, and Big/Little is a failure, Samsung is falling farther behind, and it is slowly losing the ability to compete with Apple.
This benchmark is completely unfair! You didn't compare the Samsung Galaxy Note 13 with Android 6.8.2 "Twinkies."
You just can't imagine how "creamy smooth" the interface is without experiencing Twinkies yourself. Google has improved the Ahead-of-Time compilation, debugging support, garbage collection, and octuple buffering AGAIN! Additionally, Google has developed new user interface guidelines known as "Golden Sponge Design."
You Apple sheeple just don't know what you are missing.
Comments
In the end cores are about managing thermals while maintaining performance. When performance increases via clock rate bumps, use more power than adding more cores for a given performance level, Apple will add those cores. It is tricky because adding more cores doesn't improve the performance of every app which is probably why Apple spent so much time selling Grand Central Dispatch and other technologies that help spread workloads across processors. 8mega Pixels is a compromise, like all engineering, that tries to balance the state of the art with the physical reality of the device. If you can maintain quality more pixels really is an advantage, just one look at what pros can do with a high end DSLR should highlight that. The problem is people shouldn't expect DSLR level performance out of a cell phone.
As a side note I was in to photography in my younger years. During that time I saw all sorts of silver based initiatives from 110 cameras, disc cameras and the various 35 mm point and shoots. Few of those cameras could hold a candle to the iPhone today and frankly they where at times expensive cameras. Basically you get a point and shoot camera with the iPhone for free that far exceeds the quality of these old antiques.
[quite]
And of course you'll get legions of android fans gloating that Apple gimps their phones, clearly never using phone themselves.
[/quote]
That is certainly the case. Using one certainly is a good way to sell more iPhones. However we shouldn't dismiss every concerned raised by Android users. Sometimes the wall gardened / locked down nature of iOS devices is a problem. I balance that in a couple of ways.
First; by acknowledging that I always want my cell phone to be working.
Second; to satisfy my desire to tinker i buy other hardware be it a microprocessor, Linux box or a Mac. Sometimes self control and a little diversion solves a lot of problems with reliability. Never owned an Android device! I guess I'm not that much of a geek.
The thing with Android, beyond its obvious ripoff of Apple is that why put up with such a comprimise when there is BSD and Linux to shove on these platforms. Let's face it if you want truly open either of those two are better options than a messed up Linux/Java hybrid (Android) that is more about marketing and spying. I still don't see the value in tying up a cell phone with a custom Linux install as some do. I want that cell phone to work for me all the time and frankly that is what you get with iPhone.
this shows how optimization is important
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iphone 6 plus promotion galaxy note 4
For one Intel has abused their monopoly position and that is a matter of public record.
No company is perfect and frankly Intel has screwed often but gets a free pass from industry. However anti competitive practices have harmed AMD greatly and in some case have lead directly to some of its failings. Fabs are very important whe you competition is Intel.
As for management I have to agree that at times it looked like a three ring circus staffed by idiots. That however is sadly common today in the Management of American companies. There is a strong belief in management circles that you don't need to understand tech to manage it. Frankly AM d has been able to recover, across the river from where I live Kodak use to be "THE" company and it is now just an embarrassment. Kodak wasd destroyed by professional managers that couldn't grasp the changing world around them. I can actually make a good argument that AMD wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the AMD purchase. In fact I see it as evidence that at least one person at AMD realized where tech was going in the future. Further ATI broke AMD away from the idea that they had to do production in house. They also delivered Brazos which is clearly a better product than Intelsat ATOM. Their APUs are arguably better chips for many uses also mainly dupe to the ATI buy.
[ quote]
And worst of all, AMD is it's own worst enemy. AMD has ALWAYS had this pseudo pleasure of being a #2, even when it was prime position to take #1
[/quote]
AMD was never in a position to take #1. Not even close really.
No people just aren't willing to deny that Intel engaged in harmful activities that impacted AMD. Further we don't want to dwell on just the negatives, AMD has done fairly well with many of its intitiaives.
I am an Excel power user who doesn't use a mouse, and I think the fact that an Apple keyboard is so different and the keyboard shortcuts are limited has been an impediment to faster adoption
Rather than asking for examples and then shooting them down over whatever nonsense you can throw up as a defense against the facts, why don't you just run through the top games listed in the iTunes App Store and compile your own list of major games that don't exist on Android and/or aren't playable on android (like the top tile in both iTunes and Google Play: "Five Nights at Freddies," which for some reason doesn't run right on your Nvidia Shield, which nobody else bought.)
Seriously, if iPhone were Playstation and Android were Xbox, this would not even be a challenge and Microsoft would be giving up on its games franchise. Everyone knows Android has little more than IAP garbage-ware, and most of that looks like crap on various Android hardware experiments.
When Metal came out, AnandTech wrote that Metal would be used by 'the kinds of games that don't exist on Android.' What do you think they could have possibly meant?
Seriously, you sound like the curator of the Creation Museum trying to spread the idea that most people want complicated beta crap that works like a PC from the late 1990s. You are wrong, obviously. People with money have spoken, and they're not lining up for Nvidia Shields and Galaxy S5s. You can insist that there is a healthy ecosystem for Android all you want, but who do you think you're fooling? Yourself?
Heavens above, calm down with the spitting vitriol Dan. The only point being made was that a lot of this graphical power is unnecessary for the majority of games on any platform. Yes, iOS has some nice games with high end graphics, and they'll be even better with Metal enhancements, but the higher end Android devices like the Note 4, and the Shield could almost certainly run them at a reasonable standard too, the graphical power is just icing, much like the original Xbox had over the PS2, or the PS3 had over the X360. You're throwing out benchmark facts like they actually mean anything, when they're all so powerful that any advantage on either side is almost incidental. What matters more is whether the games get made for the platforms, and it's here that iOS has a notable advantage with mindshare and a healthier app/game ecosystem.
If the benchmarks were reversed then you'd be saying they don't matter a jot, so by all means report them, but this basking in the warm glow of graphical benchmarks is a little lame. And attacking dissenting opinion with speculative "whatever nonsense you can throw up" arguments in the comments while flitting your argument between the Note 4 and "various Android hardware experiments" is, as ever, not classy.
Both the Note 4 and the iPhone 6 have more graphical power than the majority of users will ever use.
LG's OLED doesn't use PenTile. They also have an OLED screen higher resolutionn than Samsung.
The high subpixel count in PenTile arrangement needs to be discounted since they need more subpixels to make the same color, say for text.
Apple Watch is said to use LG display.
As for color accuracy, the DisplayMate article mentioned that the Samsung screen is accurate (only) in certain mode. But they didn't mention if that mode runs color correction software and consume more power. If you run color correction software, it's no longer comparing display hardware. You get better color accuracy on any other screen running the appropriate color correction software.
Funny, I have a 2048 x 1536 display in my iPad, one of the most color accurate displays ever shipped, and yet the iPhone 6 still beats it. Perhaps resolution isn't everything?
I will say that the Note 4 display on the demo units at best buy are something else. Are they much better than the Plus screen? No, but they are probably the best mobile screen I've ever seen. Bright, black blacks, crazy viewing angles, and sharp even when 6 inches away. More power efficient apparently as well.
I didn't think that tech would ever match LCDs but it has. I really think the iPhone 7 will have an OLED screen.
If you don't 3D game on your phone, it's pretty great. If you do, you'd be better off with a 1080p phone until SOCs catch up.
I dont know about the Nexus 4, but I have the iphone 6 and 6+ and the screen is absolutely stunning. Pixels stay clear even when seen from a angle.
No. No, they can't.
1. The most graphics intensive games don't ship on Google Android. e.g. Infinity Blade III (Google Android finally got Epic Citadel last year) and Zen Garden
2. The benchmarks clearly demonstrate exactly the opposite; namely that even flagship Android devices can't run the most graphics intensive games available for Apple iPhone.
The user experience of iOS is tied directly to GPU performance because everything on the screen is drawn with hardware acceleration.
On Android, not so much. It's laggy and thin feeling like Windows, and its users generally don't care because they don't appreciate that level of attention to detail. That's why they buy phones with an ASP of $215.
It's like arguing to somebody who buys 20 chicken McNuggets for $5 why food cooked to order by a chef is better, when all they really care about is enough food to make them feel stuffed but costing only $5, with the "choice" of sauce.
When you say iOS devices are fast enough and the real problem is software, are you even aware of how transparent and silly that is? iOS devices should be as fast as apple can manage at an affordable price point, and the software gets much better every year. Neither is true for android. Updates come and users mostly can't avail themselves of them.
The whole benchmark test is a waste of time. The average user doesn't seem a difference in performance from one phone to the next, so it's only good for stirring the pot for the tech geeks. Of course the Apple A8 will outperform phones that use hype and fool the fake tech geeks who actually aren't that smart into thinking their phone is better than it really is.
I just want to also mention that Samsung fan-geeks always mention how Apple likes to advertise features such as a "retina display" for a display that's not even 1080p, or wasn't even 720p at the time of release, but they'll go on a rant about how their phone has an octa-core graphics processor (for those who don't have much of a brain, that's eight cores), a quad core processor that runs slower than Apple's A8 processor, and then talk about that QHD screen that's pure hype because it's overkill on the device.
So let me get this straight... A retina display is stupid marketing. But octa-core processors, quad-core processors, and QHD screens aren't, even though that octa-core processor is a waste of cores, just like the quad-core processor, and just like that QHD screen with it's overkill in regards to the amount of pixels it has compared to what a human eye can actually distinguish. Good thing I have the logic to stick with an Apple made product.
Get real. The only thing either of you said in your "dissenting opinions" was that nobody should be caring about facts--particularly any measurable benchmarks--because speed doesn't matter and whoever cared about how well their phone performed anyway?! Hand waving nonsense.
iOS devices have always had a performance edge apparent in the UI, and the few android flagships that stand to distract attention away from the majority of outdated junk that makes up the bulk of the android platform have always pushed stats as the reason the minority of "Power users" needed to buy a new one every 4 months.
And just as with a PC, the main reason cited for having high specs on your android phone was to play games and serious apps, because android itself did a terrible job of using that horsepower to do anything else, like accelerate the UI.
What Apple is doing is creating a super fast platform that will have a 64-bit floor with Metal enhanced GPU and GPGPU. iOS already has the big games and the big apps (like GarageBand and iMovie, which are free for ios and unmatchable at any price for android).
Samsung et all are playing skate to where the puck was. That's why the new Samsung Alpha looks exactly like an iPhone 5 and most bundled apps look like ios 6. At this point, we are at the threshold where mass defection begins, just like it happened from windows to macs among Linux users, then programmers, then everyone with any business to do. Every windows PC maker has been scrambling to copy MacBook Air since 2012 as they circle the drain. Same with android. Will be the cheap option but will increasingly matter less and less.
Thanks for the advice. The problem is that the snapdragon version isn't shipping yet. So we will have to wait for that to happen to address that story. Also, Metal benchmarks are not shipping yet either.
The real point is that cnet confuses the two chips for consumers, and that Samsung's own chips are (as you note) inferior to Qualcomm rather that superior (like Apple's own designs).
You can discount the Exynos Note 4 as being a lower performing version, but a more astute observation would be to look at that and ask yourself: why?
Android and Samsung fans like to make a big deal about the fact that Samsung LSI fabs Apple's chips. So why are Apple's A7/A8 so much better than the chips Samsung builds for its own highest end flagship?
Well this article was a waste of energy since a majority of major markets get the snapdragon 805 chipset. This articles benchmarks are based on the Exnyos chipset. As you can see the galaxy S5 with snapdragon 801 (slower chipset than note 4) has numbers MUCH closer to the iPhone 6. I expect the note 4 with snapdragon 805 to be very similar to the iPhone 6 :-/ nice try though.
I think the point is that Samsung is still dependent upon Qualcomm. Apple is designing dual-core processors that run as fast as Qualcomm's quad-core processors and are more power efficient. Samsung is designing double quad-core (which is what "octa-core" really is) big.LITTLE processors that are slower and less power efficient than Qualcomm's. So yes, Samsung can ship a Note 4 that holds its own against the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but they are enriching Qualcomm in doing so.
So when people point out that Apple is dependent upon Samsung (a competitor) for displays and chip fabs, it's worth pointing out that Samsung is also dependent upon a competitor. I'm sure they'd rather use their own designs. After all, Xiaomi and Lenovo can use a Qualcomm chip just as easily as Samsung and match its performance. Apple likely has some tricks up its sleeve if it needs to ramp up processing speeds. Heck, the A8 still has 1GB of RAM. Boosting it to 2GB alone might improve performance noticeably. Plus they could ramp up the processing speed, and can optimize iOS for 4 cores. IOW, they have lots more room for performance advancements right now.
I see corrections is doing the usual; treating differing viewpoints as a "personal" attack.
As for the OP why waste 500 words when 10000 will do. A little brevity will go along way to making your point without the overload.
Also thinness, I would imagine, not that I know. But no backlight needed, correct?
If you look carefully, you can see that the table has results of the last iteration of the Note 3 running the Snapdragon CPU. It does quite well against the just-released iPhone 6 Plus, seemingly even beating it in a couple of the tests. It also outperforms the Note 4 shown here. As if Samsung is going to release a Note 4 which is slower than its predecessor.
Nearly everyone reading this is going to see/buy the Note 4 using the Snapdragon, not the benchmarked octa-core Samsung CPU. Considering the new Snapdragon CPU is both faster and more powerful than then Note 3, I think the Qualcomm Note 4 benchmarks will be much closer to the iPhone than shown in this article. Heaven forbid, the Samsung may beat it. Obviously the author gets a lot of pleasure from the superior performance of the Apple CPU, but I think the 'opponent' is a straw-man: Samsung will not take this octa-core CPU to major markets.
So I wouldn't be counting chickens just yet.
By definition, Apple is already beating the next generations of Snapdragon, simply as the A Series SOC are designed to balance performance and power consumption. This is a area that Androids generally throw really large battery capacities at to support high clock rates, usually double that of Apple. More to the point, and forgotten in this, Apple is designing its processors in coordination with its software features, whereas Qualcomm is designing for a general Android market and OS that Google controls.
So next generation, Apple drops to 14 Nm, as does Qualcomm, and all of the sudden, Apple gets to choose from either higher performance with the same battery life, similar performance with extended battery life, or more likely customer options in between, all in the same industry leading iPhone package, and all while getting the savings of large volumes at its chosen fabs. Meanwhile, all of the top Android OEM's are running Snapdragon, and in a competitive market, Qualcomm is making the profits on the SOC's, not the OEM's, and Samsung is increasingly under pricing pressure, so it becomes harder and harder to keep up with Apple A Series price/performance/power advantage. At the same time, Apple is increasingly capable of building its own imaging module's and sometime in the future, even the imagers.
This leads to margin compression for Samsung and the other leading OEM's, all while being eaten from below by the Chinese OEM's. Now I would single out Sony for moving into the classic iPhone form factor and getting many things right, something that Samsung has been unable to do.
The bottom line from this is that Apple is gaining significant design experience in ARM, SOC's, and soon GPGPU's, and Big/Little is a failure, Samsung is falling farther behind, and it is slowly losing the ability to compete with Apple.
You just can't imagine how "creamy smooth" the interface is without experiencing Twinkies yourself. Google has improved the Ahead-of-Time compilation, debugging support, garbage collection, and octuple buffering AGAIN! Additionally, Google has developed new user interface guidelines known as "Golden Sponge Design."
You Apple sheeple just don't know what you are missing.
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