Samsung Galaxy S7 And Galaxy S7 Edge Review: Hot Android Hardware

by Dave Altavilla — Friday, March 25, 2016, 11:21 AM EDT

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Galaxy S7 And S7 Edge General Compute And System Tests

AnTuTu’s latest benchmark returns a number of metrics ranked as scores, rather than frame rates or time to complete. We tested with the latest version of AnTuTu across all platforms including Android, iOS and even Windows Phone. AnTuTu returns four top level performance metric results that we're including here: CPU, RAM, 3D, UX (or User Experience) along with a total score.

AnTuTu, Mobile XPRT, And Geekbench

General System, CPU and User Experiential Performance

In AnTuTu we see some very distinct delineation lines. First, the iPhone 6S and Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge lead the test field here by a very comfortable margin. However, between the three top devices, the field is relatively tight. The Galaxy S7 surprisingly is just a notch behind the Galaxy S7 Edge, but these devices were also based on two different carrier setups (AT&T for the Edge, Verizon for the GS7), so software configuration could also vary slightly, along with the different thermal characteristics of the devices since the GS7 is smaller. Versus Apple's A9 in the iPhone 6S, the Snapdragon 820 power plants of the GS7 and GS7 Edge are otherwise very competitive, offering significantly better graphics performance, but lower CPU performance. It seems iPhone 6S' strength may lie in memory bandwidth as well, since it too took the memory test and UX test.

The MobileXPRT benchmark runs through a variety of tests to evaluate the responsiveness of a device along with its ability to handle many standard mobile workloads, use cases and applications. On the left side of the grid, for the overall score, higher is better, while the rest of the numbers represent time-to-complete, so lower is better. On the right side of the grid, higher scores are better all around.

Here we don't have the iPhone 6S to compare to since this test if only available on Google Play. Regardless, the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge take top honors here, versus the fastest Android smartphones on the market.

GeekBench taxes only CPU cores in a handset (not graphics), with both single and multi-threaded workloads.

Here the octal-core Huawei Mate 8 takes the top spot for multi-core throughput, with its ARM Cortex-A57 based Kirin 950 processor. However, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge aren't too far behind. Also, when you look at single-core performance and thus IPC (Instructions Per Clock) throughput on a per-core basis, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, as well as the iPhone 6S Plus, are on top with the nod going to Apple on this one.

Let's dive in a bit deeper on the graphics performance side of things...