Meet Vellamo

Today we take a look at Browser based performance with a new benchmark from Qualcomm!

With Google reporting daily Android device activations upward of 550,000 devices a day, the rapid growth and ubiqutity of the platform cannot be denied. As the platform has grown, we here at PC Perspective have constantly kept our eye out for ways to assess and compare the performance of different devices running the same mobile operating systems. In the past we have done performance testing with applications such as Quadrant and Linpack, and GPU testing with NenaMark and Qualcomm’s NeoCore product.

Today we are taking a look at a new mobile benchmark from Qualcomm, named Vellamo. Qualcomm has seen the need for an agnostic browser benchmark on Android, and so came Vellamo. A video introduction from Qualcomm’s Director of Product Management, Sy Choudhury, is below.

 

With the default configuration, Vellamo performs a battery of 14 tests. These tests are catagorized into Rendering, Javascript, User Experience, Networking, and Advanced. 

For more on this benchmark and our results from 10 different Android-power devices, keep reading!

 

In the more technical tests, Qualcomm has focused on HTML 5 Canvas rendering speed, and Javascript, two of the most prevalent elements in modern web design. HTML 5 tests center around testing the speed with which the phone hardware at hand can render given complex objects using the canvas tag. One of these objects include basic 3D element and motion. 

JavaScript testing centers around the industry standard SunSpider and V8 benchmarks. The SunSpider benchmark was developed by the WebKit Foundation to test real world JavaScript performance and compatibility with core JavaScript elements. Here, it provides a statistically sound measurement of rendering speed.

 

The V8 JavaScript benchmark is in a similar vein as SunSpider. V8 is actively developed by the Google Chromium team, who is responsible for the open source browser Google Chrome. 

 

Another important aspect to the Vellamo testing suite are the User Experience tests introduced. Here, Qualcomm has developed a series of test to try to simulate things like lag in scrolling which previously haven’t necessarily been quantifiable before.

While it becomes difficult to measure what these tests are actually doing, it is good progress to see companies such as Qualcomm focusing on User Experience tests in their benchmarks.

 

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