Amazon Fire HD 7 Tablet (2014) Review
Performance: CPU & Web Browsing
The Fire HD 7 is powered by a MediaTek MTK8135 quad-core processor, PowerVR G6200 graphics, and 1GB of RAM. None of that screams high-end, though the parts are only driving a 1280x800 screen resolution. For browsing chores, the Fire HD 7 uses Amazon's own Silk browser. It's based on the open source Chromium project and uses a split architecture that divides processing between local hardware and the cloud (Amazon Web Services, or AWS). There are a number of advantages that tapping into AWS provides, such as being able to pre-process webpages, apply predictive algorithms to determine the most efficient way of delivering content, routing traffic through proxy servers powered by Amazon EC2 to reduce page load times, and more.
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Browsermark provides a more thorough examination of web performance than SunSpider, and in this test, the Fire HD 7 climbed its way past 3,000. Only one other tablet made it out of the 3,000 range, that being Apple's recently released iPad Air 2. This is further evidence that the Fire HD 7 is sitting on a solid foundation for its size.
Benchmarks aside, the Silk browser is fine for surfing the web, albeit a bit overhyped in regards to architecture. It performed as expected, with decent page load times and smooth pinch-to-zoom performance, the latter of which wasn't the case a couple of generations ago.
