Dual Core: A Story Of Different Performance Ft Optimus 2X and Atrix4G

[tecnic1]

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[bplewis24]

I forgot to add the benchmark results of the LG Optimus 3D, which uses the OMAP 4430 SoC: dual core A9s @ 1GHz (same as Tegra2), but with a dual-channel memory controller (vs Tegra2's single-channel memory controller) and a different GPU.

As you can see, the Samsung Galaxy S II is also listed in the charts. It also runs dual-core ARM A9s at 1GHz, but on it's own Exynos architecture. All of these dual-core phones are in the same ballpark on these two benchmarks. Note that the Galaxy S II is running a Gingerbread build.

Brandon

 

[spillner]

These numbers are meaningless. It comes down to these simple things:

1) How responsive is the phone? If the phone isn't as responsive as the iPhone 4, then thats a huge failure. The iPhone (hate it or love it) is the industry standard.

2) How good is the internet browsing? My brothers original iPhone outperforms by D1 when it comes down to browser lag. Scrolling through data heavy websites is pretty awful. Flash is useless because the videos have piss poor framerate and you're lucky if the sound is sinced properly.

3) Stability. I hate it when my phone force closes for no reason and it seems like people on different phones run into the same problem.

Now before I get flamed, let me point out that I am a huge supporter of Android. I love the openness and customization that these phones offer. But it really seems like we're missing that homerun phone, the type of phone we can say to all the apple fan boys out there "You think the iPhones good? Take a look at this!"

 

[bplewis24]

These numbers are meaningless. It comes down to these simple things:

1) How responsive is the phone? If the phone isn't as responsive as the iPhone 4, then thats a huge failure. The iPhone (hate it or love it) is the industry standard.

2) How good is the internet browsing? My brothers original iPhone outperforms by D1 when it comes down to browser lag. Scrolling through data heavy websites is pretty awful. Flash is useless because the videos have piss poor framerate and you're lucky if the sound is sinced properly.

3) Stability. I hate it when my phone force closes for no reason and it seems like people on different phones run into the same problem.

Now before I get flamed, let me point out that I am a huge supporter of Android. I love the openness and customization that these phones offer. But it really seems like we're missing that homerun phone, the type of phone we can say to all the apple fan boys out there "You think the iPhones good? Take a look at this!"

1) I'm sorry, but it is simply not true that a phone is a "failure" if it doesn't meet the industry standard. That would make every phone a failure. And the numbers are far from meaningless. Did you read any of the comments/analysis? They directly correlate to system performance. Stop with the canned Apple-defense responses already, especially when they don't apply. They seriously disgust me.

2) The internet browsing is "industry standard." Have you seen any videos about web-surfing on Android vs iOS? Android has held the web-browsing lead over iOS ever since Froyo debuted. In fact, it puts it to shame in some comparisons (and this is not new to Honeycomb/the Xoom).

3) Of course force-closing would be a major drawback. However, that has zero to do with this thread. This is about dual-core performance. Force closing (is this about apps force-closing or about the phone rebooting?) is either about bad software (or software compatibility). Either way, dual-core or not, bad software is not unique to any type of SoC architecture. It would not discriminate.

By the way, I've had my D1 reboot on me I believe once over the past 1.5 years. I know of plenty of iOS users who have had that many force-reboots and some who've had the problem so bad they returned their phone.

Brandon

 

[tecnic1]

I was specifically referring to apps force closing. Words with friends is pretty bad.

I haven't had any reboots yet.

AT&T and blur haven't been as bad as I expected. AT&Ts network is actually pretty good near me and way faster.


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[bplewis24]

I'd like to elaborate on some of my earlier comments in the last post as well as some of my earlier posts. Here are some snippets of comments and analysis on Tegra2, multi-threaded Android support, and real-world results from the Optimus 2x review:

Android itself already is multithreaded natively. The even better part is that multiprocessor smartphones can immediately take advantage of multiple cores and distribute threads appropriately with Android.

The big question on everyone's mind is whether Android 2.2.x can take advantage of those multiple cores. Turns out, the answer is yes.

Android’s browser is multithreaded, but again certain workloads and pages lend themselves to parallelization much better than others.

Panning and zooming on the 2X is speedy, even if it’s still choppier than the Galaxy S’ hardware accelerated browser. What’s really noticeable on the 2X is how fast Adobe Flash is. Generally while browsing I can feel when Flash ads are really slowing a page down—the 2X almost never felt that way.

It's still difficult to draw real conclusions about why some SoCs perform better than others, however in this case I'd guess that it's probably equal parts A9 and dual-core giving the Tegra 2 its performance advantage in BrowserMark.

The move from Android 1.6 to 2.1 was responsible for a big jump in performance, and we saw another major improvement with the move to Froyo (2.2).

The combination of these two js benchmarks proves one point: the LG Optimus 2X and NVIDIA's Tegra 2 provide the fastest Android web browsing experience we've seen thus far. A message that is continuously echoed in our day to day use of the phone. The Optimus 2X is the first Android phone to render web pages as quickly, if not quicker, than the iPhone 4.

One of the places where iOS trumps Android, is in scrolling/rendering in some scenarios because it has full hardware acceleration. This is probably what spillner was referring to. With Gingerbread, a lot of this has been addressed, and with Honeycomb comes full hardware acceleration. Scrolling on my Gingerbread ROM is nearly silky smooth. If I uninstall Flash, it gets even faster. These things should be considered.

TL;DR: It's fair to say that these benchmarks and Android's continuing software optimization tweaks are having real-world effects on the overall Android experience. The dual-core smartphones can take advantage of this right now, even on Froyo, but more so on Gingerbread & Honeycomb. I can attest to this, as my seemingly-sluggish D1 is now snappy as almost anything on the market now that I'm running a Gingerbread ROM with a 1.0GHz overclock. I can't imagine if it were actually running on current architecture.

Brandon

 

[spillner]

These numbers are meaningless. It comes down to these simple things:

1) How responsive is the phone? If the phone isn't as responsive as the iPhone 4, then thats a huge failure. The iPhone (hate it or love it) is the industry standard.

2) How good is the internet browsing? My brothers original iPhone outperforms by D1 when it comes down to browser lag. Scrolling through data heavy websites is pretty awful. Flash is useless because the videos have piss poor framerate and you're lucky if the sound is sinced properly.

3) Stability. I hate it when my phone force closes for no reason and it seems like people on different phones run into the same problem.

Now before I get flamed, let me point out that I am a huge supporter of Android. I love the openness and customization that these phones offer. But it really seems like we're missing that homerun phone, the type of phone we can say to all the apple fan boys out there "You think the iPhones good? Take a look at this!"

1) I'm sorry, but it is simply not true that a phone is a "failure" if it doesn't meet the industry standard. That would make every phone a failure. And the numbers are far from meaningless. Did you read any of the comments/analysis? They directly correlate to system performance. Stop with the canned Apple-defense responses already, especially when they don't apply. They seriously disgust me.

2) The internet browsing is "industry standard." Have you seen any videos about web-surfing on Android vs iOS? Android has held the web-browsing lead over iOS ever since Froyo debuted. In fact, it puts it to shame in some comparisons (and this is not new to Honeycomb/the Xoom).

3) Of course force-closing would be a major drawback. However, that has zero to do with this thread. This is about dual-core performance. Force closing (is this about apps force-closing or about the phone rebooting?) is either about bad software (or software compatibility). Either way, dual-core or not, bad software is not unique to any type of SoC architecture. It would not discriminate.

By the way, I've had my D1 reboot on me I believe once over the past 1.5 years. I know of plenty of iOS users who have had that many force-reboots and some who've had the problem so bad they returned their phone.

Brandon

I have played with every Android phone, I'm sorry but none of them scroll as nice as the iPhone 4. Thats what I want, I want an Android phone that is as snappy as the iPhone. You are comparing browser speed than I agree with you, Android kills iOS.

These charts always have the iPhone in the middle of the pack yet if you were to set the Nexus 1 next to the iPhone 4 which would you say was faster?

I'm not an apple fan boy (Steve Jobs is SATAN), but everytime I see these charts I laugh because they never seem to translate into actual performance, because if they did half the phones on these list would outperform the iPhone and I'm sorry but they don't.

Again, I'm an Android fan. The open source, the customization, the sheer options I have at my disposal are amazing. I just wanna see that standout phone. I think its coming soon.

 

[y0manda]

So...why did someone run gfx based benches to compare dual core phones when the OS cant even use dual cores yet? What a waste of time lol...

I was wondering the same thing. LOL

 

[bplewis24]

These charts always have the iPhone in the middle of the pack yet if you were to set the Nexus 1 next to the iPhone 4 which would you say was faster?

There is a reason why the N1 is slower in page rendering, which I explained in my last post. Hardware acceleration (which has been missing completely before Gingerbread) has almost everything to do with that.

I just wanna see that standout phone. I think its coming soon

Well I think you will be pleasantly surprised, because they are already upon us.

Cheers, and sorry if I seemed testy earlier.

Brandon

 

[spillner]

These charts always have the iPhone in the middle of the pack yet if you were to set the Nexus 1 next to the iPhone 4 which would you say was faster?

There is a reason why the N1 is slower in page rendering, which I explained in my last post. Hardware acceleration (which has been missing completely before Gingerbread) has almost everything to do with that.

I just wanna see that standout phone. I think its coming soon

Well I think you will be pleasantly surprised, because they are already upon us.

Cheers, and sorry if I seemed testy earlier.

Brandon

No problem, it seems my upgrade is coming just in time!

 

[yiannis]

These numbers are meaningless. It comes down to these simple things:

1) How responsive is the phone? If the phone isn't as responsive as the iPhone 4, then thats a huge failure. The iPhone (hate it or love it) is the industry standard.

2) How good is the internet browsing? My brothers original iPhone outperforms by D1 when it comes down to browser lag. Scrolling through data heavy websites is pretty awful. Flash is useless because the videos have piss poor framerate and you're lucky if the sound is sinced properly.

3) Stability. I hate it when my phone force closes for no reason and it seems like people on different phones run into the same problem.

Now before I get flamed, let me point out that I am a huge supporter of Android. I love the openness and customization that these phones offer. But it really seems like we're missing that homerun phone, the type of phone we can say to all the apple fan boys out there "You think the iPhones good? Take a look at this!"

I'm sorry but my D1 runs a fast custom ROM that makes flash usable and data rate acceptable. Better than the iPhone 2 which it was competing against at the time.

It's funny that people simply ignore that superior hardware (D1 vs iP2) means that your phone will run better longer.

 

[yiannis]

These numbers are meaningless. It comes down to these simple things:

1) How responsive is the phone? If the phone isn't as responsive as the iPhone 4, then thats a huge failure. The iPhone (hate it or love it) is the industry standard.

2) How good is the internet browsing? My brothers original iPhone outperforms by D1 when it comes down to browser lag. Scrolling through data heavy websites is pretty awful. Flash is useless because the videos have piss poor framerate and you're lucky if the sound is sinced properly.

3) Stability. I hate it when my phone force closes for no reason and it seems like people on different phones run into the same problem.

Now before I get flamed, let me point out that I am a huge supporter of Android. I love the openness and customization that these phones offer. But it really seems like we're missing that homerun phone, the type of phone we can say to all the apple fan boys out there "You think the iPhones good? Take a look at this!"

I'm sorry but my D1 runs a fast custom ROM that makes flash usable and data rate acceptable. Better than the iPhone 2 which it was competing against at the time.

It's funny that people simply ignore that superior hardware (D1 vs iP2) means that your phone will run better longer.

Oh by the way, ask iP2 owners if they know what a customized ROM is.