By running the latest versions of the various benchmark suites, we can see that a number of devices are eliminated. Effectively, if Amazon’s not updating the OS anymore (2013 and earlier, basically), some of the benchmarks aren’t going to run.
We start our benchmarking out with Geekbench. Like all our tools, Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmarking tool. Geekbench has a computing focus, so it mostly tells us about the CPU power, while our other benchmarks mostly tell us about GPU power.
CPU Benchmark, Overall Performance | ||
Device | Single Core (Higher is Better) | Multi-Core (Higher is Better) |
2011 Kindle Fire | – | – |
2012 Kindle Fire HD 8.9 | – | – |
2013 Kindle Fire HDX 7 | – | – |
2016 Fire HD 8 | 625 | 1671 |
2014 Fire TV STick | * | * |
2016 Fire TV Stick | 435 | 1152 |
2015 Fire TV | 1557 | 2908 |
2017 Fire TV | 647 | 1803 |
* Unable to run bench
Here we can see single and multi-core performance of various Fire platform devices. In general, single core performance is most important for gaming. It’s notable that the 3rd Generation (2017) Fire TV is better than any Fire TV Stick, but notably behind the 2nd Generation Fire TV with its larger form factor. With 2018’s Fire TV Cube being basically the same hardware as the 2017 device, the hope that Amazon would create a higher power device is pretty much shot. The Cube might have been interesting with a
Compute Benchmark, Overall Performance | |
Device | RenderScript Score (Higher is Better) |
2011 Kindle Fire | – |
2012 Kindle Fire HD 8.9 | – |
2013 Kindle Fire HDX 7 | – |
2016 Fire HD 8 | 1048 |
2014 Fire TV Stick | – |
2016 Fire TV Stick | 803 |
2015 Fire TV | 1972 |
2017 Fire TV | 1125 |
Compute Benchmarks are only of of moderate interest on the Fire platform. They tell us about GPU performance as it pertains to GPU compute applications. While GPU is all the rage in a lot of areas, it’s not really pertinent to most Android devices, which offload this sort of workload to cloud computing resources (think Alexa, here).
Update Notes
- 7/28/18 Updates
- Added 2017 Fire TV and discussion