Google Nexus 9: Preliminary Findings
by Joshua Ho on November 3, 2014 1:00 PM ESTCPU Performance
While there’s a great deal of ground to cover on the tablet as a whole, one of the most interesting aspects of the Nexus 9 is the SoC. While we’ve tested Tegra K1 before, we were looking at the more traditional Cortex A15 variant. The Denver variant (Tegra13x) is mostly similar to Tegra K1-32 (Tegra12x), but instead the CPU cores are a radically different design. In order to get an idea for how this translates into real world we can look at a few of our standard benchmarks in this area, although Google Octane couldn’t complete a full run. This build of Android clearly has AArch64 active, which means that we should be able to directly compare the Nexus 9 to the iPad Air 2 for performance.
As one can see, at least at this stage in development the Nexus 9 can show some level of promise at times, but can be a bit disappointing in others. In SunSpider, Denver is generally even slower than Krait. However, in a benchmark like Kraken the Nexus 9 easily pulls ahead to take the top spot. In Basemark OS II the Nexus 9 does well overall but this seems to be due to its graphics performance/GPU performance and storage performance rather than CPU-bound tests like the system and web tests. It seems that when the code morphing systems works as expected, Denver can deliver significant amounts of performance. However, when such code morphing falls flat its true performance with a dual core, 2.3 GHz configuration is around that of a four Krait core CPU system at similar clock speeds. Once again, it's important to emphasize that this build is far from complete so performance should improve across the board with launch software. The fact that Tegra13x can approach A8X in CPU performance in some tests is definitely interesting to see.
Battery Life
While Denver's performance is a bit mixed, it's worth taking a look at battery life to see how Denver performs in these areas. As always, our battery life tests are all run with the display calibrated to 200 nits.
While an early build, it seems that the Nexus 9 is reasonably competitive in battery life but I'm not sure that these results are perfectly accurate. At any rate, efficiency at this stage seems to be par for the course, which should bode well for shipping software. This is a mostly display-bound test though, so we'll look at Basemark OS II to get a better idea for compute-bound battery life.
As one can see, while the battery life of the Nexus 9 ends up on the bottom for phablets and tablets, the overall performance during the test is quite high. We're working on a better comparison for the final review, but this should give a good idea of what to expect in general.
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tipoo - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
This has always been the way, never the first review out, but almost always the most in depth.esterhasz - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
OK, preliminary numbers, no fast conclusions. But I can't help feeling that the shield tablet looks actually pretty attractive in that lineup.melgross - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
I really had expected a typical full iPad Air2 review before this. I can't understand what's taking so long.It would be more interesting to see full reviews of both already. Include the latest Full sized Samsung model.
Krysto - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
I wish Anandtech would stop focusing so much on Sunspider. Google said it 2-3 years ago that they aren't focusing Chrome on Sunspider performance anymore because it's a very simplistic test without much relation to real-world web app performance. They even did a 50xSunspider test to prove how hopefully obsolete it is, if some of you remember.The Basemark OS benchmarks are all over the place. In some it tests twice as good as the iPad, in others half as flow. I don't think Basemark OS has its algorithms well optimized, and it may give some subcomponents way more score than they deserve, or way too little in others - or Basemark OS may simply be acting weirdly with this new processor.
melgross - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Kraken seems to give the same relative performance results with the same ordering of devices, so it doesn't seem to make much difference which one they use.danbob999 - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
javascript benchmarks are all useless to benchmark hardware. They were created to benchmark software (javascript engines)melgross - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
It's not just benchmarks g hardware. It's benching the OSs and the browser engine too. So it does matter. Besides, as I said, since Kracken scores seem to follow the Sunspider scores in ranking, it doesn't matter than much.darkich - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
Exactly.My Note 3 scores 570ms in Samsung browser, while Chrome manages only around 1100ms
arsjum - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Are we reading the same chart? In Sunspider chart, Nexus 9 is well below iPad Air, whereas in Kraken benchmark, Nexus 9 shows a slightly better score than than iPad Air 2.eiriklf - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Sunspider results are far too easy to optimize for in the browser, but it will differ for different architectures. Krait could for instance not really distance itself from cortex a9 in sunspider for a good while on Android.