Samsung Galaxy S6 review: Subject Zero

Subject Zero

Orlin Milinov, 13 March 2015.

Samsung Galaxy S6 system performance tests

With the Samsung Galaxy S6 the company went its own way, meaning it used the in-house Exynos 7420. It's the first mobile chipset to be built on a 14nm fabrication process (Snapdragon 810 is on 20nm), which should reduce power usage. That in turn reduces the dreaded thermal throttling that was a major issue in the Exynos vs. Snapdragon debate recently.

The Exynos 7420 and Snapdragon 810 are not that different in terms of processor, both use a big.LITTLE setup with four Cortex-A57 cores at 2.1GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5GHz. The GPU is a Mali-T760 from ARM and it shares 3GB of RAM with the processor.

Update, April 3: We received a retail unit and reran the benchmarks. Some results improved slightly (noticeably the 3D graphics performance) compared to the pre-release unit we used initially.

The Galaxy S6 runs a 64-bit version of Android 5.0.2 and all eight of its cores are 64-bit capable. This is good for the future, but for now 32-bit apps run just fine - in fact, AnTuTu 5 offered both options. It returned equal scores in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes, crushing the Snapdragon opposition (805 for the Nexus 6 and Galaxy Note 4, 810 for the LG G Flex2).

AnTuTu 5

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    69396
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    49803
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    49273
  • LG G Flex2
    47680
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    45660
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    45348

Basemark OS 2.0 tips the scales the other way and narrowly gives the win to the LG G Flex2, with the Galaxy S6 trailing by less than 5%.

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

  • LG G Flex2
    1726
  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    1674
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    1267
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    1267
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    1176
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    1160

Looking at just the CPU performance at GeekBench 3, we see a massive advantage in multicore performance. The Snapdragon 810 runs its CPU cores a little slower (0.1GHz), but that's far too little to account for the difference. Basemark OS 2.0 confirms both the single-core and multi-core difference.

GeekBench 3

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    5215
  • LG G Flex2
    3604
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    3394
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    3285
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    3120
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    2970

Basemark OS 2.0 (single-core)

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    6306
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    6165
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    5977
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    5624
  • LG G Flex2
    5597
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    5557

Basemark OS 2.0 (multi-core)

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    26799
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    21841
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    21026
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    19237
  • LG G Flex2
    18856
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    18386

The Samsung Galaxy S6 has a QHD screen - 1,440 x 2,560px - which is around 80% more pixels than a 1080p screen (like the LG G Flex2 and Moto X have). Offscreen tests normalize resolution at 1080p so you can compare raw performance, while on-screen tests predict real-world gaming performance.

The Mali-T760 proved faster in general than the Adreno 430 found in the curved LG phone and even the beefy PowerVR GX6450 in the Apple iPhone 6. Depending on the graphics level playable framerates are achievable at native resolution, though more complicated graphics (like in GFX 3.0) push it well under the treshold.

Basemark X considers only off-screen results and predictably gives the win to the Galaxy S6.

GFX 2.7 T-Rex (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    59
  • LG G Flex2
    49
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    40
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    38.9
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    27
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    27

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    24
  • LG G Flex2
    22
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    18.6
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    18
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    12
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    12

GFX 2.7 T-Rex (onscreen)

Higher is better

  • LG G Flex2
    48
  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    38
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    29
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    28
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    27.4
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    26

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

  • LG G Flex2
    22
  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    14
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    13
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    12
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    11.9
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    11

Basemark X

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    27169
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    20901
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    20043
  • LG G Flex2
    19360
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    12190
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    11798

For web browsing performance we used the Internet app (stock web browser) as Samsung sprinkles proprietary optimization magic that's not available in Chrome or the vanilla Android browser. The Galaxy S6 wins the JavaScript race in Kraken 1.1 with a slight margin, less than we expected from the large lead in CPU performance.

For general web browsing BrowserMark 2.1 puts the Samsung flagship on par with Apple's iPhone 6 (and far ahead of the rest) despite having to render pages at QHD while the iPhone screen is barely over 720p.

Kraken 1.1

Lower is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    4154
  • LG G Flex2
    4621
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    5181
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    5968
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    6088
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    6260

BrowserMark 2.1

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    2718
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Lollipop
    2232
  • LG G Flex2
    2086
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    2066
  • Motorola Moto X (2014) Lollipop
    1562
  • Motorola Nexus 6
    1447

The Samsung Galaxy S6 (and S6 edge for that matter) is the fastest mobile phone you can have at the moment and with 64-bit support in place this should remain the case for some time to come. The flagship offers top notch performance for any use case and may not be surpassed in 2015, looking at just the 5" size (obviously the Note 5 is coming and should be a bit faster).

Samsung Galaxy S6 storage performance test

Samsung Galaxy S6 is the company's first flagship not to offer microSD expansion. Until the S6 and S6 edge duo all Galaxy Note and Galaxy S smartphones had memory expansion, and, in fact, it was one of the highlights of both series.

Samsung even supported moving App to SD card even when Google disabled the feature - a rarity these days. So, what happened with Samsung's love of external storage?

Well, the company came up with its own UFS 2.0 storage, which uses "Command Queue" tech (as seen in Solid State Drives) for accelerating the speed of command execution. The new technology promises 2.7x faster performance than the eMMC 5.0 memory found in the previous crop of flagships and yes, the Galaxy S6 has one.

There lies to the key to the lack of a microSD slot. If you were to put an SD card on your Galaxy S6, you'd have compromised this blazing-fast performance. This is actually true for all 2014 high-end phones, but it seems Samsung wanted users to truly feel the difference this time around and has decided on not including the storage expansion on the feature list even if it made a lot of users sad.

Let's see how fast it really is.

We ran AndroBench - a popular storage benchmark, which gauges the read and write performance of sequential and random operations. Samsung promised the new UFC 2.0 storage in Galaxy S6 and S6 edge is 2.7x faster in random read than the one used on the Galaxy S5. We found it to be even better - the Galaxy S6 did 20000+ IOPS (input-output operations per second) at random read compared to 4800 IOPS of the Galaxy S5 on the same test. That's 3.25x times better.

We also put the microSD slot to test, using the fastest microSD card we had around - a Transcend Premium 300x microSDHC UHS-1 Class 10 16GB. We tested the microSD read/write performance on both the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 4. This should give you the idea of the performance drop you get when apps are accessing the microSD card instead of the fast internal storage.

The test results clearly put the Galaxy S6 on top of the sequential and random read, with massive lead over the competition. It was also the champ in random read and write operations with small variations between it and the Galaxy S6 edge.

And before you ask, all tested devices were on Android Lollipop. Also all tests were ran with h/w encryption turned off - which is the default setting under Android Lollipop.

Update, April 3: We retested the storage with the retail unit we received. The pre-release unit had some issues with sequential write speeds, which have been resolved in the retail unit.

Sequential Read, MB/s

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6 edge
    321.44
  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    311.05
  • LG G3
    239.68
  • HTC One M9
    239.19
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4
    212.45
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    206.85

Sequential Write, MB/s

Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6 edge
    145.19
  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    139.20
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4
    126.69
  • HTC One M9
    123.97
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    56.31
  • LG G3
    39.53

Random Read, MB/s

MB/s, Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    77.58
  • Samsung Galaxy S6 edge
    76.79
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4
    22.10
  • LG G3
    21.81
  • HTC One M9
    20.27
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    18.79

Random Write, MB/s

MB/s, Higher is better

  • Samsung Galaxy S6 edge
    20.20
  • Samsung Galaxy S6
    19.76
  • HTC One M9
    13.93
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4
    10.71
  • LG G3
    9.42
  • Samsung Galaxy S5
    6.91

The Samsung Galaxy S6 edge (and S6 for that matter) is the fastest mobile phone you can have at the moment and with 64-bit support in place this should remain the case for some time to come. The flagship offers top notch performance for any use case and may not be surpassed in 2015, looking at just the 5" size (obviously the Note 5 is coming and should be a bit faster).

Cloud storage can be just as effective for backups - being equally seamless when running in the background. And you do get 115GB worth of free OneDrive storage with each Galaxy S6, so that's a start, isn't it?

Reader comments

Samsung Galaxy F54

  • Joe
  • 28 Jun 2023
  • CGH

Indeed Samsung Galaxy S6 is specially designed and powerful. I bought mine February 2017, but for few weeks now it goes off frequently. I have to press the power, volume and home keys synmontanously to on it, now off. Pls help solve the problem. Than...

  • Anonymous
  • 18 Feb 2023
  • XIa

How do you put off data