October 3, 2014

Looking for more kNps with Snapdragon 800: Mission fails!

"Higher frequency for less nodes"
A new item introduced in my series of Droidfish tests in retail stores was SAMSUNG TAB-S 8.4. It has the Snapdragon's quad-core 800 CPU clocked at 2.26 Ghz.

Although the values look attractive, the performance lacked under Droidfish and Stockfish5 engine. My standard 1 minute analysis test at initial position with 4 cores and 64MB hash size has only run at 480kNps. Another big disappointment with Snapdragon.

Where have all these higher Ghz gone???

Due to limited time and conditions of a store, it's not possible to root the device and ask for performance governor to force the CPU to run at full speed. Thus, it's an "out-of-the-box" result which could be improved by tweaking. Maybe... but i can't imagine how much.

For the moment, JUST STAY AWAY from Snapdragon if you expect stronger chess play. Even the Intel Atom's, after all their internal translations from ARM instructions to X86 ones, perform well with Stockfish engine. This is an exact case for "theory fails vs reality".

Now i wanna find an opportunity to repeat the same test with Snapdragon-801 and Intel 3770.

Below are the results i've collected so far. All except Exynos were done with factory CPU settings.

MAKER   MODEL            CPU         GHz    kNps
------- ---------------- ----------- ------ ----
Asus    MemoPad ME176C   Atom 3745   4x1.86  747
Samsung N7100            Exynos 4412 4x1.60  700
Samsung SM-T320 8.4"     SD-800      4x2.26  480
LG      V500 GPad        SD-600      4x1.70  439

3 comments:

  1. i'm also looking for a definitive way to benchmark:

    --- 64-bit 14nm Exynos 7420 octa-core (4 @1.5 GHz, 4 @2.1 GHz)
    --- Intel Atom Z3580 22nm 64-bit quad-core processor 2.3 GHz

    These are the Samsung s6 Edge versus the Asus zenfone2. Note that zenfone2 has 4GB DDR3 RAM and s6 has 3GB DDR4 RAM.

    How best should i do these benchmark to choose which smartphone is best? The Samsung is 4x more expensive, despite these two close specs. Hope to hear from you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry for late reply. You can go for both cpu's depending on your needs. They are really different and have their specific advantages.
    Exynos is very compatible but i don't think 8 cores will work simultaneously. Even yes, it's very hard to avoid throttling. It will probably switch between two sets of 4 cores.
    Intel is seriously improving on Android. Cheaper, resistant to throttling. But needs x86 compiles. Arm compiles won't work or will run 2-3 times slower.
    One important thing to consider is the Android version. Lollipop can't use most engines. I recommend Kitkat for the moment for best compatibility.
    Good luck.

    ReplyDelete
  3. To benchmark chess perfo, install Droidfish. Set hash to 64MB and threads to 4. Start analyze mode and let it run for 1 minute minimum. Compare knps shown in the bottom by both devices.
    You may repeat a third test on Exynos with 8 threads to compare it with 4 threads. If close knps, this means it switches two sets of 4 cores :-)
    You can also try Mediatek 8 cores cpus. They run all together.

    ReplyDelete