Tegra 2 vs OMAP 4 vs Cortex-A8 vs 2nd-gen Snapdragon

AndroidAndMe has done up a pretty decent comparo of the current Android smartphone kings:

http://androidandme.com/2011/03/news/tegra-2-benchmarks-motorola-atrix-4g-vs-lg-optimus-2x/

Ugh, my blog posts are getting lazy. I've been getting my networking lab put back together though and hopefully I'll be able to start doing some real posts again!

MWC Overload!

I'm just going to drop in here and say that some of the stuff I've been reading from MWC is absolutely insane.

Tegra 3 chips demoed?!

TI OMAP 4430's upclocked SGX 540 outperforming Tegra 2?!

Galaxy S II's Mali-400MP GPU benchmarked!

Qualcomm's successor to Scorpion?!

Cortex-A15 news!

As you can see, AnandTech wins my approval for the best articles. As usual, they provide well-written, well-researched articles that manage to dig up tidbits of SoC information that I'm not able to find anywhere else (and ultimately are accurate!) I'll give AndroidAndMe the runner-up because when it comes to NVIDIA's Tegra platform, Taylor Wimberly keeps his ear to the ground.

I recommend reading through AnandTech's Smartphones section for some great info as to what the SoC future holds in store for us (and the future looks bright!) If you're pondering getting a Tegra 2 phone, trust that AndroidAndMe will keep you up to date on any developments.

I hate to say it boys and girls, but these guys have got everything covered... I've got no inside scoop this time around. That said, I'm glad to see more tech blogs take a much more interested and informed approach to SoC comparison compared to a year ago, and manufacturers are releasing much more information about their chips now that the mobile market is interested in more than just clock speeds.

Thank you, tech bloggers. I originally wrote my Hummingbird vs Snapdragon article out of frustration with the amount of poor information available to those wanting to compare or understand ARM hardware. Since then, perhaps due to the increased availability of information available by the SoC manufacturers, we're seeing much-more informed articles about ARM hardware making it out to the masses.

I may end up on the sidelines, but I'm happy knowing that readers have a lot better reading material to base their smartphone investment upon!

Help me pick my Galaxy S...

Alright folks, I need your help. I have to decide which Galaxy S phone I'm going to buy this fall.

Currently, I'm torn primarily between the Verizon Fascinate and the Sprint Epic 4G. Here's the Pros vs. Cons for me:

Fascinate


Pros:
Already on Verizon (and so is my girlfriend)
Better network
Thinner and lighter

Cons:
Bing Search (Per Engadget it can't be changed to Google either!)
No front-facing camera.
Expensive monthly payment
Only 3G connection


Epic 4G


Pros:
4G connection (available in my city too)
QWERTY keyboard
Front-facing camera

Cons:
Would have to switch carriers (and my girlfriend doesn't really want Sprint)
Less reliable network
Still a fairly expensive monthly payment, and $10 extra for 4G data service.
Phone is heavier and thicker

Android phones benchmarked; it's official, the Galaxy S is the fastest.

Consider this post a follow up on my ruminations post, in which it turns out I was likely completely wrong.

But hey, you can't win 'em all, and at least I was right about one thing; the 1GHz OMAP 3640 3630 isn't terribly different than the 550 MHz OMAP 3430 on the Droid, and at 1 GHz doesn't really give us any surprises when it comes to performance.

Then why did it score so well in this test? Taylor Wimberly, owner of AndroidAndMe.com (yes, the same website I've frequently complained of putting bad data in its articles), has performed a series of benchmarks that explains why.

Ruminations on various benchmarks for the OMAP 3600s, Hummingbird, and Snapdragon.

EDIT 7/17/2010 - The benchmarks have been explained for the most part, see my post "Android phones benchmarked; it's official, the Galaxy S is the fastest." Or, feel free to read on, but I was probably wrong. :)

I've been thinking about some of the performance benchmarks I've been seeing on AndroidAndMe.
http://androidandme.com/2010/05/news/high-end-android-phones-benchmarked-with-quadrant/
http://androidandme.com/2010/06/news/high-end-android-gpu-showdown/
http://androidandme.com/2010/06/news/hands-on-the-motorola-droid-2/

CPU performance from the new TI OMAP 3630 3640 (yes, they're wrong again, its 3640 for the 1 GHz SoC, 3630 is the 720 MHz one (TI disagrees) is surprisingly good on Quadrant, the benchmarking tool that Taylor is using. In fact, as you can see from the Shadow benchmarks in the first article, it is shown outperforming the Galaxy S, which initially led me to believe that it was running Android 2.2 (which you may know can easily triple CPU performance). However, I've been assured that this is not the case, and the 3rd article seems to indicate as such, given that those benchmarks were obtained using a Droid 2 running 2.1.

Now, the OMAP 3600 series is simply a 45 nm version of the 3400 series we see in the original Droid, upclocked accordingly due to the reduced heat and improved efficiency of the smaller feature size.

If you need convincing, see TI's own documentation: http://focus.ti.com/pdfs/wtbu/omap3_pb_swpt024b.pdf

So essentially the OMAP 3640 3630 is the same CPU as what is contained in the original Droid but clocked up to 1 GHz. Why then is it benchmarking nearly twice as fast clock-for-clock (resulting in a nearly 4x improvement), even when still running 2.1? My guess is that the answer lies in memory bandwidth, and that evidence exists within some of the results from the graphics benchmarks.

Hummingbird vs Snapdragon: the 1 Ghz smartphone showdown

NOTE: This article has been officially hosted at AlienBabelTech.com. For a better reading experience, you may want to view the article here!

If you follow smartphone technology at all, you're sure to have heard of the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It's the reigning smartphone CPU heavyweight; a 1 GHz processor packed with a multitude of features, based upon the same ARM CPU technology that modern smartphones such as the Droid, Palm Pre, Nokia N900 and iPhone 3GS use. However, unlike those processors, the Snapdragon runs at 1 GHz while the others run at 600 MHz and under, and thus has become the chip of choice for premium smartphones.

The Snapdragon SoC (System on a Chip) has appeared on the market in several devices recently. The most well-known example is probably the Google Nexus One, though it had already appeared in a previous device, the HTC HD2. The HD2, released November 11th 2009, had a Snapdragon processor as well as a massive 4.3-inch display (diagonally measured), and received rave reviews that almost unanimously ended with one major complaint: the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. It’s an operating system largely unchanged from its predecessors and prone to software problems. In addition, to really make good use of the processing power of the phone, applications needed to exist that made use of that power, and the majority of applications written for Microsoft’s mobile OS just didn’t take advantage. The industry begged for an HD2 with Google’s Android mobile operating system, and HTC responded that it wasn’t going to happen.

But then Sprint announced the HTC EVO 4G at the CTIA 2010 trade show, and the mobile industry collectively went wild. Here was the phone everyone had been dreaming of; a 4.3-inch display and 1 GHz Snapdragon like the HD2, as well as a deployable kickstand, 8MP rear camera, 1.3MP front camera, HDMI port, and 4G WiMAX connectivity. The HD2 had essentially been reborn, new and improved, for the Android OS. Judging by the limelight cast upon the EVO 4G by the mobile enthusiast community, the EVO 4G is positioned to become one of the best selling smartphones of the year.

However, another device debuted at CTIA 2010 that was largely overshadowed by the launch of the EVO 4G: the Samsung GT-i9000 Galaxy S. This new phone, in contrast, has a 4-inch Super AMOLED display (more on that later), 5MP rear camera, 0.3MP front camera, (GSM/HSPDA) 3G/3.5G connectivity… and was mentioned almost as an afterthought to contain Samsung’s own 1 GHz processor. Samsung spent a lot of time at CTIA 2010 talking about the Super AMOLED display, and in contrast only a few moments disclosing details on the new SoC, stating that it has over 3x better performance than the leading competition (referring to graphics performance), and bests all other smartphone processors on the market today. Only later was it confirmed that the SoC was Samsung’s new 45 nm “Hummingbird” platform, the only production 1 GHz ARM processor thus far to challenge Qualcomm’s Snapdragon.

When the news of these phones hit the tech blogs, nearly all of the attention went to the HTC EVO 4G. The EVO 4G was what many had been waiting for, and the Samsung was typically given hardly a second glance. But let’s take a moment to really compare the hardware of these two Android 2.1 smartphones, and then we’ll even go a bit deeper into how the SoCs actually stack against one another when it comes to CPU and GPU processing power.