Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) Review
by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on October 1, 2013 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Galaxy Note 10.1
GPU & Performance
Although Exynos 5420 fixes the big underlying issue with Samsung’s silicon on the CPU front, it’s actually the GPU that sees the most dramatic change. ARM once again wins Samsung’s GPU business and equipped the Exynos 5420 with a 6-core Mali-T628, replacing the PowerVR SGX544MP3 from the previous Exynos 5410. Overall performance takes a huge step forward. Looking at T-Rex HD (offscreen) we see the best example of where the Mali-T628MP6 lands: about 11% slower than Adreno 330 and 8% behind IMG’s PowerVR G6430 in the iPhone 5s. It’s definitely a competitive GPU with the latest and greatest from IMG and Qualcomm, but not faster than either. It’s incredible to think of just how far we’ve come. It wasn’t too long ago that we were complaining about non-Apple SoCs not taking GPU performance seriously, but here we are talking about competitive performance across the big three ARM vendors.
NAND Performance
We've been tracking storage performance on these devices for a little while now and have noticed forward progress over the generations. The new Note 10.1 does reasonably well in our IO tests, with its strengths being sequential read and random write performance (arguably the two more important metrics). Since the tablet ships with Android 4.3 it should feature FSTRIM support (something we're still verifying on the 2014 Edition), which will help keep NAND performance high as long as you don't fill up all of your storage (remember: try to keep ~20% of the internal NAND free at all times).
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Da W - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Consistently beaten by the iPhone 5s on benchmarks, says a lot about apple's SoC.Otherwise for productivity i'll go with a 899 surface pro 2.
chewyqc - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Indeed, but still, the iPhone 5s SoC is manufactured by Samsung and design by ARM. It's perfermance are very good.darwinosx - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
The iPhone 5s chip is designed by Apples chip engineers. Spanks Samsung's new flagship tablet hard of course which you seem concerned about.identity - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Here comes the Apple fanboy vs Android fanboy wars. Go troll that garbage somewhere else.kevith - Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - link
Ye Hear!Samus - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
Why does ANY of this matter?The A7 doesn't run Android.
The Exynos doesn't run iOS.
Who cares which is faster. In the end they're on completely different OS's. Anybody who buys a CPU without consideration for the OS is completely dense.
Origin64 - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
Any claim about how "fast" the new iPhone is is negated by how slow it actually moves from screen to screen. 60fps is great, but taking 120 frames to slide in a new windows takes too long. So does having to go back to home and then three menus deep just to turn on wifi. Contrast Android where that is a matter of sliding a bar down and pressing a button. Sure, it stutters, but it is quicker. People care too much about subjective smoothness instead of absolute productivity.steven75 - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
Someone needs to Google "iOS Control Center" and update their anti-Apple propaganda. ;)Speed is definitely useful in the many high quality content creation apps on iOS like GarageBand and iMovie.
misfit410 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I have to imagine after Apple sued so many people for making similar UI elements, and so many Apple folks backed Apple for doing so, they just never imagined Apple would steal so many UI elements from Android in one update.sundragon - Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - link
What are you talking about?What do you think Project Butter was supposed to correct? They spent all that money to fix the amazingly smooth OS, no - compared to iOS, it stuttered. 4.2 made a huge difference but it still stutters on the Nexus 7 V1 and is somewhat smooth on the 2, by comparison my first gen iPhone was smooth and it had a crappy ARM 11 CPU...
Oh and here's something to chew on ;)
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/19/apples-iphone-5-...