Samsung Galaxy S4 Announced Ships in April

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by Hilbert Hagedoorn, Mar 15, 2013.

  1. Hilbert Hagedoorn

    Hilbert Hagedoorn Don Vito Corleone Staff Member

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    Samsung has announced the Galaxy S4. Revealed at tonight's Unpacked event in New York City, the Galaxy S4 will take the mantle of the Galaxy S III as Samsung's new flagship smartphone, sporting a ma...

    Samsung Galaxy S4 Announced Ships in April
     
  2. kanej2007

    kanej2007 Guest

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    Looks identical to the Note II, awesome spec nevertheless!
     
  3. Speed Weed

    Speed Weed Guest

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    Managed to survive an hour of that streaming rubbish from Times Square very late last night/early this morning. :(
    Really painful to watch.
     
  4. Lane

    Lane Guest

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    I had cut the sound and just watch the "text" of the specifications when it was coming,
     
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2013

  5. nicugoalkeper

    nicugoalkeper Master Guru

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    I don't know way you did it, is better to wait for some real reviews , hoping Hilbert will do one to !
     
  6. hallryu

    hallryu Don Altobello

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    The new Sony phone looks much better.
     
  7. Chillin

    Chillin Ancient Guru

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    Galaxy 3S

    Seriously, there is nothing here for the most part that can't be backported to the Galaxy S3 or that apps can't do for any modern android phone. The field is wide open for Motorola and Google with their "X-phone" and Apple to finally make a new modern interface and continue to take the lead. Absolutely no one I talked to was anymore excited for the S4 than they were for the S3.

    That being said, props to Samsung for the replaceable battery and Micro-SD.

    In addition, that was the corniest presentation I have perhaps ever watched, it was almost painful. No one wonder why Anand just cut his liveblog short; I would have also just done a hands on and left when I saw that show.
     
  8. Chillin

    Chillin Ancient Guru

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    One of the things I also can't understand is why the rear camera can't record at 60 FPS, the hardware is certainly powerful enough...
     
  9. eclap

    eclap Banned

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    well, the presentation was mainly about new Samsung software. I don't care about that, I'll get rid of that bloatware on day one. I'll be buying the s4 for it's impressive spec, not the Samsung software. you can't reproduce that on the s3 or any other phone atm.
     
  10. Denial

    Denial Ancient Guru

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    The conference was terrible, they basically said nothing about the hardware. US variant is getting the S600, which at this point I think is better than the octacore, especially considering the A15's are clocked at 1.2ghz.

    The LTE version isn't shipping till later this year too, so who knows when that is. At the point I think I'll end up getting something else.
     

  11. Vinnie

    Vinnie Ancient Guru

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    And.. It is still made of plastic. :D
     
  12. Denial

    Denial Ancient Guru

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    I prefer the plastic as long as it's well constructed and isn't the slippery garbage that is the back of the S3.
     
  13. Vxheous

    Vxheous Guest

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    Just because it looks like a S3, doesn't mean it would run like one. Expected better from all the posts here considering this a tech site. Exynos 5 Octa vs a Snapdragon S4, 1080p 441ppi vs 720p 306 ppi, the specs are pretty impressive.
     
  14. Denial

    Denial Ancient Guru

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    I think most people know/knew the specs were going to be improved. It basically brings the S3 up to par with current generation phones. There is nothing really special about the hardware. A15's at 1.2Ghz probably will come in at around what Krait cores perform at anyway.

    The biggest complaints about the S3 were the button layout, aesthetic and the interface. Samsung did absolutely nothing to remedy any of that, despite the fact that the korean guy got up on stage and said like 15 times that they designed the phone around consumer feedback. Last time I checked no one wanted to play 7 songs synced at the same time.
     
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2013
  15. deltatux

    deltatux Guest

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    Ummm, the Cortex A15s run at 1.6 GHz and the Cortex A7s run at 1.2 GHz in the same chip for the Exynos 5 Octa. It runs in the big.LITTLE configuration that ARM designed. Honestly, I'm more impressed by the big.LITTLE design than Qualcomm's design. The Cortex A7 kicks in for most tasks like browsing, texting and video playback, and then the Cortex A15 will kick in when absolute performance is required, say when you're gaming. Personally, i don't understand why Samsung opted to put 4 Cortex A7 cores since programs that will trigger the Cortex A7 wouldn't need 4 cores, a dual core Cortex A7 would make more sense but I guess Exynos 5 Hexa wouldn't sound as sexy as the Exynos 5 Octa. When either the A7 or A15 is on, the other is powered down, so it'll help save battery. Qualcomm doesn't have a similar design. Even NVIDIA's Tegra architecture has a similar design (Tegra 4 relies on all A15s but the companion core is built on a different process than the rest of the performance cores).

    Plus, pure clock speed doesn't really make much difference since the experience is still smooth, hell, I underclocked my Nexus 4 as I really didn't see a performance hit, yet I got a lot more out of its battery life.

    deltatux
     
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2013

  16. Chillin

    Chillin Ancient Guru

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    Here is the first official benchmark of the Exynos 5 version:

    http://youtu.be/zPaIA16VqQI


    Numbers are decent, but it looks like the Snapdragon 600 will blow past this easily. I wonder how the Adreno 320 stacks up to the 544MP3.
     
  17. Chillin

    Chillin Ancient Guru

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    It is not yet certain what runs at what. Anand said that he heard that the A15 is at 1.2:
    https://twitter.com/anandshimpi/status/312361491095498752

    Either way, it looks like the Snapdragon 600 phones are faster anyways based on the benchmarks. The GPU parts might be a different story though.

    And I'm not sure how practical it is cost wise and silicon wise to have such a complicated setup as big.little rather than four efficient cores that can clock independently of each other (Snapdragon, etc). It must take up no small amount of space on the die.
     
  18. Denial

    Denial Ancient Guru

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    Couple things here. Number one Quad A7's are necessary because you are going to be using them a lot. At MWC Samsung showed a demo and pretty much the 4 A7's were used at 100% power, essentially 85% of the time. As for big.little, my problem is that it's only going to benefit use cases where you're racing to sleep. You fire up those A15's at 1.6Ghz and you're immediately going to 4-6w TDP, in which a game would drain the battery in probably close to 2 hours. Second, Samsung doesn't own an ARM architectural license. So they couldn't modify ARM's big.little design for 2 A7's anyway.

    As for Samsungs implementation, according to anandtech they chose to run the A7's at 1.6Ghz since they are used often and the A15's at 1.2 to save power. So basically they reversed it. At full A15 load, the processor should cap at 2w which is far more reasonable for a phone.

    So basically you're getting A15's which run at Krait performance anyway. I'd honestly rather have the better GPU in the A600 + integrated LTE than the Octacore any day of the week.
     
  19. deltatux

    deltatux Guest

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    The Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 doesn't come with integrated LTE, it's an APQ, not an MSM SKU. It'll be like the Nexus 4 where it'll require an external baseband radio to work.

    As for the licensing, ARM do have dual core A7 designs, Samsung just chose to use quad core A7 designs instead, Samsung, being the manufacturer can choose how they implement their ARM cores even though they don't have the ARM ISA license.

    I read differently and that the A15s will run at 1.6 GHz and A7s will run at 1.2 GHz. Even Anandtech say so as well, not sure where you got your clockspeeds from...: http://anandtech.com/show/6768/samsung-details-exynos-5-octa-architecture-power-at-isscc-13

    As for when the A15 gets fired up, not everyone uses their phones to game (I don't use my phone for gaming for instance), so for most people, they'll mainly be using the Cortex A7 and then only fire up the A15s whenever they do game or do other types of processing that will trigger the A15s (like computationally heavy applications like postprocessing effects or image processing). We'll have to see actual benchmark to see how well Samsung's implementation of ARM's big.LITTLE design to see how it compares to NVIDIA's Tegra design and Qualcomm's traditional SoC design.

    deltatux
     
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2013
  20. Chillin

    Chillin Ancient Guru

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    Speed wise, the A15 used in the Exynos 5 seems to be a tad slower than the Krait 300 in the Snapdragon 600. But the GPU in the Exynos 5 (544MP3, 51.2 GFLOPS looks to be much faster than the one in the Snapdragon 600 (Adreno 320, ~30-35 GFLOPS).
     

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