where did you read that dave? and how much of a performance improvement do you think this would give the passion over the moto droid?
Actually, I read it on Qualcomm's site in the data sheet for the mobile phone version of the Snapdragon. I'll give you a link:
Snapdragon™, Qualcomm Snapdragon™, QCT Snapdragon™ - QCTConnect.com
The Passion likely runs the QSD8650 variant (CDMA capable for mobile handsets).
As far as performance improvement, it would likely depend on exactly how good the Scorpion CPU is at number crunching. It depends on a lot of things, such as CPU cache; memory bus width, etc. Same as on a PC platform. For example, both an Intel Core i7 and an AMD Phenom x4 are x86-64 instruction set compatible; but even at a given clock speed, they are not directly comparable. The Core i7 is simply faster in most instances.
And concerning the GPU, OpenGL performance differences would mostly depend on the quality of the device driver and the actual architecture of the GPU. The Droid very well could end up being a faster device overall, especially if the Snapdragon's GPU isn't as efficient, or the drivers aren't as well optimized. Very hard to tell until we can directly compare the 2 devices. Theoretical maximum triangle and fill rates mean little to nothing in the real world. I do know that I cannot dig up any specifics on the Snapdragon GPU; however the Droid's PowerVR SGX530 is an established GPU in the market, and I uses a tile-based rendering scheme known for its efficiency.
POWERVR Visual IP Cores
If it beats the droid in both clock cycles and gpu power than I guess its a big difference!
If only it were that easy, buying consumer computing devices would be so much easier. Basically, like I said above; architectural differences could end up making the Droid's processor faster. Same with the GPU. If clock speed meant everything, the Intel Core2 series would have never caught on and people would all be using Pentium 4s. After all, a Core2Duo at 1.86GHz blew the doors off of a 3.2GHz dual-core P4. Yet based on clock speed, the P4 SOUNDS faster. My current video card (nVidia GTX275) runs at 666MHz, my old 8800GT ran at 700MHz. Yet my GTX275 is roughly 3x faster.
we don't even know how fast the Droid is, let alone a phone not even on the market.