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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andrewaggb - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Personally, I thought it looked like the ipad air 2 was the clear all around winner. Hopefully the final build will do better.darwinosx - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Plus the Nexus 9 screen is crap.icebox - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
As always Google hopes to push cloud storage to everybody with a max. of 32GB and no expansion.jjj - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Funny how you don't include TK1 results in phone reviews graphs but you include the iphone in tablet reviews. Intentional or not it's still unethical.melgross - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
That's a very discordant statement. How could it be unethical if it's done unintentionally?Ryan Smith - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
We don't have a TK1-equipped phone. Right now the only devices it appears in are tablets.ruggia - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
think he's upset about 5s being in the benchmarkBarilla - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
I'm hoping the full review will dive deeply into the cpu design, I'm really interested what Nvidia has actually cooked up with their project Denver.toyotabedzrock - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
When did the benchmarks get run? Shouldn't the final build be available today? Or will it be over the air when the first tablets reach people in the mail?Liveartonline - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link
Wow, the GPU perfomance of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S is utter trash. I didn't know the GPU performance of the Mali-T628 would be THAT bad compared to the K1 and A8X. Thank god I didn't buy one.