The Ultimate Android CPU / GPU Comparison Guide

SoC Breakdown

The SoC includes the CPU, GPU, I/O logic on one piece of silicon. There are similarities shared for the various implementations as many share a common CPU and/or GPU and operate at a similar frequency. But the CPU, GPU, and clock speed don’t tell the whole story. There are also important differences that you should take note of, mainly RAM speed and number of channels as well as optional additions such as NEON support on the TI OMAP 4 which enables much improved floating point performance. We will breakdown the different CPUs and GPUs later in the article.

Dual core phones are the next big thing and because of this we are seeing a shift in the SoC landscape. The TI OMAP 4, NVIDIA Tegra 2, and Samsung Exynos (formally Orion) SoC have their dual-core versions based on the ARM Cortex-A9. Qualcomm on the other hand is developing the their Gen 3 Snapdragon SoC which still uses the older ARM Cortex-A8 CPU but to compensate it will be clocked at a higher 1.2 GHz. It will be interesting to see which gains traction as time goes on.