Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge Review
Performance: Browsing and JavaScript
Next, we'll take a look at how the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge compare to other smartphones by examining a few benchmarks that are currently available in the Android Marketplace.
First, let’s take a look at the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:
This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other. Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:
Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.
Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.
Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval). In addition, in comparison mode it tells you if you have enough data to determine if the difference is statistically significant.
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In the past, we’ve noticed that the Chrome browser is typically slower than other browsers in this test, and we're seeing it here. Our S6 Edge test unit was a Verizon handset, and it lacked the vanilla "Internet" app that shipped on the AT&T Galaxy S6. The stark difference between these two is purely based on the app used. For kicks, we ran this test on our S6 with Chrome, and the score was within 3ms of the S6 Edge. It's strange that Chrome fares so poorly on this test, but so it goes.
We relied on Chrome for both handsets here, and again, we find that Chrome isn't the best when it comes to benchmarks. The browser is speedy in real-world use, but struggles in testing. For what it's worth, you'll notice that the S6 and S6 Edge are so close that the differences in scores are immaterial. That'll be a trend as we go along considering that the innards of the two are the same.
