Samsung Galaxy Tab S Review, Top Shelf Android
Performance: Browsing and JavaScript
Next up, we have some numbers from 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.
 |
|
We ran the SunSpider and BrowserMark tests in both the standard Internet browser and in Chrome, both of which come preloaded on the tablet. The Galaxy Tab S 8.4 earned the best scores using the standard browser. The scores from the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 were excellent in the SunSpider test, as you can see from the chart where the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 earned fifth place.
 |
|
In Rightware’s Browsermark test we see very similar results as we did with the SunSpider test where the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 reports an excellent score that’s just behind Apple’s iPad Air. Here again, the standard Internet browser returned scores that were higher than in Chrome.
