Garmin - Benchmark - F7/E2 comparison & positioning

silentvoyager said:

I am not sure why CPU benchmark score even matters for a watch like Fenix. It is simply not designed to do CPU intensive tasks. It is optimized for longer battery life rather than performance and intentionally underclocked to use as little power as necessary for reasonable performance.

TL;DR I feel like the Garmin watch UX has improved a lot over the years, and it’s hard for me to imagine that faster CPUs aren’t at least partially responsible. (I could be wrong tho. Maybe the only reason they use faster CPUs is bc older CPUs are no longer available or cost efficient. I worked in the embedded device space for many years, so I have seen that kind of thing happen. I will say that moving to a faster processor — along with more memory — for family of devices absolutely allowed us to greatly improve the UX.)

Maybe CPU speed isn’t paramount, but imo, UI responsiveness and fluidity has improved a lot over the past few generations of Garmin devices. Some of that may be due to what you said about memory or storage access, and some of that may be down to the presence of a GPU on the newer touchscreen watches (e.g. the GPU may facilitate smooth scrolling, although I’ve also seen transparency effects that aren’t present on the older non-GPU devices, and I’m aware that the GPU is also used for certain types of animations.) But I’d imagine at least some of that has to be due to CPU speed.

I used to run with a Forerunner 630 touchscreen watch (released 2015):

- it did not support any kind of smooth scrolling (when you swiped from page to page, instead of having the content track your finger and scroll smoothly, the new page would just slowly replace the old page without any kind of transition)

- the ui was just slow in general (whether scrolling through activity pages or settings menus)

The slowness of the UI combined with the finicky touchscreen meant that during a long run workout, I didn’t even bother to try to switch activity pages (there was no way to scroll with buttons on the 630.)

Using a modern 955 watch is like night and day compared to that 630. I’ve also used a 935, which seemed less responsive compared to modern watches.

Having said all of that, there’s still stuff on Garmin watches that’s too slow, such as generating a route on the fly from the watch. Idk how much of that is due to hardware limitations vs. software implementation and whether it’s practical to expect that kind of stuff to ever be “fast” on the kind of hardware that Garmin produces.

I get that battery life considerations mean that Garmin is never going to make hardware as fast and capable as an apple watch (for example). The UX will never be as good either, regardless of hardware limitations. Just look at the Connect and Connect IQ phone apps, or Spotify on Garmin watches (idk if Garmin or Spotify developed Spotify for Garmin, but I could write an essay on everything that sucks about it.).

20240712

Enduro V1 

SW 27.00

CPU 3.8 / 29.4 Pips

 Not sure if anyone wanted to see this score or even if it’s needed

Need to get someone with a Fenix 8 to run the benchmark

not sure apps are compatible, new SDK 7.3.0 for these new Series came out today only.

I'm requesting it on FB, forums, blogs, waiting ...

20240907 - Add - Fenix 8 / Enduro 3 / Fenix E

• Fenix 8 47mm AMOLED | 006-B4536-00 | SW 11.60 | 454x454 | Connect IQ 5.0.1 | CPU 6.4/ 45.5 Pips
  • jsla7527
• Enduro 3 | 006-B4575-00 | SW 11.60 | 280x280 | ConnectIQ 5.0.1 | CPU 6.5/  45.5 Pips
  • Sitronen

hello, forerunner 965 if it could be possible. Thanks

search on its forum it was done after the launch, results are the same like V2 Plus.

See the table of the first post in this thread. If it is not write, this is because its "similiar". For example F8 Series ;-)

new models - Instinct 3 Amoled & Solar

• Instinct 3 Amoled 50mm | 006-B4587-00 | SW 7.08 | 416 x 416 | ciq 5.0.2 | cpu 6.4/ 45.5 Pips

• Instinct 3 Solar 45mm | 006-B4585-00 | SW 6.29 | 176 x 176 | ciq 5.0.2 | cpu 5.6 / 41.7 Pips