Performance Testing
PeformanceIn order to compare the performance of phones with similar clockspeeds, but different mobile architectures, we have come up with this new experimental mobile device performance testing. For this test, we ran the mobile versions of Linpack, a popular tool for measuring Floating Point operations in supercomputers. We ran Linpack on a variety of our own personal devices, including Android and iOS devices.
Disclaimer: Real world CPU performance isn’t necessarily indicative of MFLOPS score
We can make some very interesting conclusions from this graph. First off, we see that there seems to be a strong relationship between mobile device performance based on operating system. The original Motorola Droid running an Android 2.2 ROM at the default clock of 600MHz outperforms the Droid X with a clock speed of 1GHz. This shows how much Froyo improves performance, and just how important it is for both Motorola and HTC to push out updates for Froyo.
Editor’s note: These benchmarks aren’t like the benchmarks you’ll see in our PC-based CPUs and GPUs; they are much more dependent on the OS and environment in which they are run and truly the only realistic apple-to-apples comparisons can be done with vanilla versions of the same OS. Unfortunately, that is hard to come across in the phone world today and applications like HTC Sense and Blur running over the OS will also drastically affect results.
We are working on our sorts of benchmark suite that will test real-world performance, itself a very difficult thing to do with phones as they are still so inherently different from one another.
