The Samsung Galaxy A9 (2016) came into our office for a review, but we’ll marvel at its 6″ Super AMOLED screen later. For now, let’s look at the chipset – it’s our first encounter with the Snapdragon 652.

It’s a mid-range chipset, but it’s Qualcomm’s first (and among the first in general) to feature Cortex-A72, the successor to A57. It has four of them, plus four A53s. Basically, it’s like the Snapdragon 810, but the big cores are next generation.

The GPU is Qualcomm’s 5th series, an Adreno 510, which promises up to 40% speed increase and up to 40% power saving compared to the Adreno 430. It also supports the new Vulkan API, which is a low-level, low-overhead interface between 3D games and the hardware.

That’s assuming equal build and it’s also the only place where the S652 truly shows it’s mid-range character. It was built on a 28nm process (used since at least the Snapdragon 600 in 2013). That’s compared to 20nm for Snapdragon 8xx and 14nm for the latest chipsets, including another 6-series entry, the 625.

The manufacturing process is important for efficiency – more nanometers mean more power is used. This limits the clock speed that can be achieved with no cooling (like on a phone).

Compared to the Kirin 950 used in the Huawei Mate 8, which also uses 4x A72 + 4x A53, the clock speeds are a good 0.5GHz lower. We’ll see the impact this has on performance.

We kick things off with AnTuTu 6, a full-system benchmark. The Galaxy A9 (2016) trounces the A5 (2016) even though they are part of the same lineup. It also comes withing a hair’s breadth of the S808-powered LG V10, a recent flagship. The Mate 8, Nexus 6P and Note5 have a significant lead, though.

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AnTuTu 6
Higher is better

Huawei Mate 8
91609

Huawei Nexus 6P
89345

Samsung Galaxy Note5
81615

LG V10
67547

Samsung Galaxy A9 (S652)
64591

Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)
35689

Let’s investigate closer. The single-core performance of the A72 cores should be 20%-60% faster than an A57 clock for clock. That’s the key though, the flagship chipsets are clocked high enough to offset this.

Basemark OS 2.0 (single-core)
Higher is better

Huawei Mate 8
7332

Samsung Galaxy Note5
6745

Huawei Nexus 6P
6014

Samsung Galaxy A9 (S652)
4455

LG V10
4261

Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)
2469

Still, when all eight cores are engaged, the Galaxy A9 (2016) pulls ahead of the S810-based Nexus 6P. It comes close to the Galaxy Note5 too.

Basemark OS 2.0 (multi-core)
Higher is better

Huawei Mate 8
41897

Samsung Galaxy Note5
28360

Samsung Galaxy A9 (S652)
22334

Huawei Nexus 6P
17661

LG V10
17127

Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)
16466

Finally, the GPU. Adreno 510 is the base for the 5xx series, but even it should be competitive with the 4xx generation. Apparently not as fast as the Adreno 430 (probably due to clock speed reasons again), but it’s as fast as the Adreno 418. It even matched the Mali-T880 in the Huawei, but that one is low on cores, just 4 (the Note5 has 8 T760 cores).

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)
Higher is better

Huawei Nexus 6P
17

Samsung Galaxy Note5
15

LG V10
10

Huawei Mate 8
10

Samsung Galaxy A9 (S652)
9.3

We mentioned heat. You would expect a 28nm chip to get pretty steamy, but the Samsung Galaxy A9 (2016) and its Snapdragon 652 chipset run cool even under load.

We’ll be back with a full review of the A9…

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