Performance
For the Galaxy S6 Edge Samsung has takin a completely new route for its CPU. In the past they used Qualcomm processors like the Snapdragon 801 in the Galaxy S5. This time around they went with the Exynos 7420 SoC. Exynos is a series of ARM based SoCs made by Samsung themselves, so this time around they went in house. The Exynos 7420 SoC is built on a 14nm manufacturing process where the Snapdragon 810 was made on a 20nm process. The Exynos 7420 SoC is very similar to the Exynos 5433 that they used on the Galaxy Note 4. They both use four ARM Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but the 7420 has a higher clock speed on all eight cores . The A57 runs at 2.1GHz and the A53’s run at 1.5GHz. For its GPU the Exynos 7420 SoC uses an ARM Mali-T760 MP8 running at 772MHz. This means the S6 moved to an 8 core setup from the quad core that the S5 had. For performance I think there are a lot of reasons to not get all that excited about the additional four cores though, in a lot of situations most cores go unused.
That said to get a better look at that I did make some big changes to our benchmark suite to make sure we are testing single core performance as well as multi-core performance. In addition to the Vellamo results that test the single and multi-core support, I added storage testing because slow storage can slow down an otherwise fast device. One of our graphics tests was updated and didn’t fit our testing any longer so I added BaseMark X for additional gpu performance testing as well as BaseMark OS II as another overall performance test.
So to start off my testing I ran the Galaxy S6 Edge through three different browser based benchmarks. I was really surprised to see just how wide of a range the results were though. For Google’s Octane V2 the S6 and the S6 Edge were both right at the top of the charts, well above anything else. In Browsermark 2.1 though the results were on the other end of the spectrum. Then for Sunspider they were near the middle of the phones tested.
Next I ran through our two gaming performance tests. With BaseMark X I don’t really have enough of a pool of tested phones to be able to compare but in 3DMark both phones performed extremely well. In fact oddly enough the top three phones were all Samsung’s with the Note 4 that has basically the same but slightly slower SoC as the S6 tops the chart. This and the fact that our Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge had a decent difference does show that the performance does still range from phone to phone even when you have the same hardware.
Our new storage benchmark uses AndroBench to do both read and write speed testing on the storage. The Galaxy S6 Edge pulled an impressive 322 for read speed, putting it up closer to the SSDs that we see for PCs than phones.
In Vellamo where we test both the single and multi-core CPU performance I was impressed to see that the S6 pulled a nice lead on the Note 4 in both tests. The extra clock speed helped a lot here, especially with the single core results.
For general all around benchmarks you can’t go wrong with PCMark. The results for the BaseMark OS II benchmark aren’t really helpful right now without other phones to compare too but in PCMark the S6 Edge and S6 were all the way up at the top of our charts, over all of last year’s hot phones as well as the recently replaced Sony Xperia Z3v that I tested earlier this year.
The test benchmark brought us back to PCMark once again but this time for battery performance testing. Oddly enough, even though the two S6’s have the same battery capacity the results were surprisingly different. I think this is a great example of how different the battery results can be when you first get your phone and after every day use. The S6 was tested early on (when we sent it back) and the S6 Edge wasn’t tested until more recently. That said how do the results look? Well They are both a huge jump over what the previous Galaxy S phones have done but there is still room to improve assuming the real world results are closer to what we saw with the heavily used S6 Edge. I am impressed that Samsung was able to see so much battery life with a 2600mAH battery when the other phones with good battery life had much larger batteries.
Beyond the performance numbers how did the Galaxy S6 Edge perform day to day? Well the biggest thing I want to mention is the huge difference between the normal S6 and the Edge in overall comfort. The curved screen and thin sides actually lowered my overall impression of the phone almost immediately. The Edge frankly feels uncomfortable in my hand in comparison to the S6. The thin edge also made me worry that I would drop the phone although I didn’t drop it at all in my testing. The curved screen does add a few interesting features. I say interesting because they are cool but when using the phone I almost never used them. The biggest is if the phone is flipped over and you get a call the edge of the phone will light up. You can set this to different colors depending on the person and it will get help get your attention. There is also a night clock feature that during the night the screen shows a small dimly lit cock along the edge that you can see from the side if you have your phone on your nightstand. This same feature also will show some notifications and news story’s if you set that up. The curved screen had a downside as well. Because the screen itself is flat behind the curved glass and also because apps aren’t designed for a curved edge there are a lot of apps that will need you to touch something right on the curve of the phone making it hard to touch what you are aiming for. If Samsung were to maybe have the normal screen stop before the curved glass and then add features on the curve I would be less bothered by it all.
