Conclusions
So which Android SoC is best? Unfortunately there is no simple answer to this question. While the CPU and GPU combination on the SoC play a huge part, there are a variety of other factors to consider including display resolution, total device RAM, memory type and bandwidth, co-processors that speed up activities such as video decoding, and even the version of Android.
You can also see that the CPU frequency plays a part but only when comparing CPUs with the same architecture. The ARM Cortex-A9 based SoCs look to be the ones to beat. The TI OMAP 4 features dual channel DDR2 RAM which might give it a slight advantage, but the NVIDIA Tegra 2 is no slouch especially in the graphics department. The new Qualcomm Snapdragon may be based on the older ARM Cortex-A8 CPU but it clocks in at 1.2 GHz which might make it competitive but that remains to be seen.
Speaking of graphics, the PowerVR SGX540 looks to be neck and neck with the GeForce in the NVIDIA Tegra 2 but the Adreno 220 looks to be the king of the hill. You should take this with a grain of salt as the Adreno 220 was tested on a Qualcomm development device, there are no phones as of yet that take advantage of this hardware.
We can’t wrap this up without talking about dual-core support. I wrote an article about that here. It looks like Android <= 2.3 has kernel support for multiple CPU cores but the Dalvik virtual machine doesn’t take advantage of this support. Starting with Android 3.0 Honeycomb there will be support for multi-core devices in Dalvik and applications. This support should be rolling out to Android 2.4 Ice Cream as well so that phones and not just tablets can take advantage of feature. With these enhancements you will be able to see improvement even in single threaded apps as memory garbage collection can be done in one core and applications will be executed in another.
The last thing to consider, especially with mobile devices, is battery life. Powerful handsets don’t make much difference if you can only get a couple hours of use before you are looking for a power outlet. The results are still out on this one but we will see this picture come into focus over the next few weeks as more of these devices come to market. I will save that discussion for another day and another article.
Thanks to AnandTech for the benchmarks.
