It Primarily Taxes The Device’s CPU
Now that the brand new 2020 Amazon Fire TV Stick 3 and Fire TV Stick Lite have been released, it’s time to see how they stack up towards present Fire Tv fashions, previous and current. While computational benchmark scores are on no account going to inform you ways effectively a machine will carry out at actual-world everyday duties, they’re still helpful to know how much raw power each Fire Tv, Firestick, and Fire Tv Cube have to supply, do you have to push them to their limits. I’ve run all 10 Fire Tv fashions which have ever been released through 4 common benchmarks that test their CPU, GPU, Memory, and more. Here are the outcomes. Each Fire Tv was factory rest and absolutely updated to the most recent software version out there as of right now. All gadgets had been left idle for several hours previous to the test and rebooted for each new benchmark. I ran each benchmark 3 instances on each system (yup, that’s a hundred and twenty exams total) and have taken the common of the 2 highest scores.
These are all newly run scores from the final 24 hours on the first, 2nd, & third-gen Fire TV Stick, the Fire TV Stick Lite, the 1st & 2nd-gen Fire Tv Cube, the Fire TV Stick 4K, the first & 2nd Fire Tv packing containers, and the 3rd-gen Fire Tv pendant. One of the most popular benchmarks is Geekbench, which runs just a few dozen tests and provides results for each a single-core and all obtainable CPU cores. It primarily taxes the device’s CPU, so it’s fascinating that the Fire TV Stick Lite persistently scored ever so slightly better than the Fire TV Stick 3, despite the fact that they have the very same CPU. This is probably going attributable to the truth that the Fire TV Stick 3 has onboard Dolby decoding and Tv/AV equipment control, which the Fire TV Stick Lite does not. One or each of these features probably take up a tiny little bit of resources on a regular basis, which is mirrored in this benchmark score.
A much more outstanding instance of this sort of CPU overhead taken by a function is with the 1st-gen Fire Tv Cube and the third-gen Fire Tv, which, again, share the exact same CPU. Their single-core scores differ slightly, but there is a big distinction of their multi-core rating as a result of the 1st-gen Cube’s always-itemizing mics consume about half of a core at all times to detect the Alexa wake word. The 2nd-gen Fire Tv Cube has the same overhead requirement, but its powerful 6-cores have loads of processing power to spare. The AnTuTu benchmark is a cumulative score of its CPU, Memory, and UX checks. Like Geekbench, it closely emphasizes the CPU (about 50% of the score), however unlike Geekbench, AnTuTu devotes a third of its rating to the device’s memory efficiency. It’s interesting that The Fire TV Stick 3 outperforms the Fire TV Stick Lite by about 3% in this take a look at. Looking at the rating breakdown exhibits that the vast majority of that benefit was in the memory tests.
To affirm the outcomes, I ran the PassMark memory and disk checks on the 2 new Firesticks and that take a look at additionally showed an advantage for the Fire TV Stick 3 over the Fire TV Stick Lite, particularly with data write speeds. These next two benchmarks, 3DMark and GFXBench, both take a look at the gadgets GPU. The GPU is primarily used for affordable tv stick video games, so these scores represent each device’s gaming capabilities, but the GPU does play an element in rendering parts of the interface and how easily it feels when shortly navigating round. The 2 new Fire Tv Sticks are crushed solely by the 2nd-gen Fire Tv Cube and 2nd-gen Fire Tv box, which are each obvious powerhouses in the case of gaming capabilities. It’s worth noting that in all of those benchmarks, together with these gaming benchmarks, the brand new 1080p Sticks slightly, but constantly, outperform the Fire TV Stick 4K. It’s most likely not a big sufficient difference to be noticeable in common use, but it’s there nonetheless.
These 3 latest Firesticks all use the same GPU, use very related CPUs, and have the same 1.7Ghz CPU speed/cores. My guess for the Fire TV Stick 4K’s barely inferior performance is the extra resources needed to output a 4K interface as a substitute of a 1080p interface. The new 1080p devices do run Fire OS 7, whereas the Fire affordable tv stick Stick 4K runs Fire OS 6, so that may additionally must do with the performance distinction. The newer OS , which is based on Android 9 as an alternative of Android 7.1, might be slightly better optimized. The Fire TV Stick 4K is a good system and has been very properly received by the Fire Tv enthusiast neighborhood, so it’s good to see that the new entry-stage Fire TV Stick Lite and Fire TV Stick 3 perform simply as well as the 4K Stick. It’s exhausting to consider that these relatively low cost and tiny new Fire Tv Sticks now pack about the identical power as the original 1st-gen Fire Tv field that started it all.