Two OMAP 3430 Phones: Nokia N900 and Motorola Droid
by Brian Klug on June 10, 2010 9:29 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- N900
- Maemo
- Motorola Droid
- Droid
- MeeGo
- Android
- Mobile
Middling Performance
To measure performance, I continued using the WiFi page loading test methodology Anand described in his HTC Droid Incredible review, and also added in a few other tests that are android specific.
Our first test is loading the AnandTech.com front page, where we've got lots of text and images to stress bandwidth and parsing.
Next is the very intensive engadget.com homepage load. There are a number of flash elements here, taxing the HTC Incredible and N900 alike.
We also continue to run the SunSpider 0.9 JavaScript benchmark. This interestingly enough will illustrate the huge JavaScript performance delta between the N900's Maemo browser and the Android browser, however the comparison across Android devices gives a good idea how much the OMAP 3430 differs from the Qualcomm Snapdragon.
Common to the Android platform are two benchmarking applications that have slowly seen a rise in popularity - Linpack for Android and Benchmark Pi. Here we can get a good idea of the performance difference between the OMAP 3430 and the Snapdragon SoCs.
We can see that the OMAP 3430 holds its own, but still just isn't as fast as the 1 GHz Snapdragon SoC. What's interesting here is that the Motorola Droid's Cortex A8 is running at 550 MHz, some 81% slower than the 1 GHz Snapdragon. However, the performance difference between the two is only 44% for Linpack. Benchmark Pi numbers are closer to the kind of scaling I'd expect, as the 81% increase in clock speed results in a 73% faster compute time.
In practice the N900 is undoubtably a snappy phone. While using Maemo, I never once wanted for more power, even though users have successfully achieved 1 GHz or more on the OMAP 3430 in the N900 and Motorola Droid. Only after getting 8 or more webpages open did I really start to notice any lag or slowdowns at all. On the Motorola Droid, Android 2.1 was more than usable, and far faster in practice than the ARM11 class SoCs used in some of the other Android phones, like the 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7600A or MSM7200A in the HTC Hero.
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akse - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
I've got my N900 clocked to use 250Mhz idle and 805Mhz stress clocks and it fastens everything by huge amount. 600Mhz is sometimes a bit slow and if you up it a little bit, everything starts to get smoother..The custom kernel is using lower voltages but higher clocks than nokia stock kernel.. which is why 805mhz drains just about the same amount of power than 600mhz with stock kernel.
I just love the fact that you can do that kind of things on this phone..
One guy was asking how to backup sms messages.. well there wasn't any app for it so you could just run a command with sqlite in Xterm to search through the database for all sms's and forward the results with > to a text file :)
Exodite - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
That's a truly epic article, the in-depth look at both the hard- and software side of things is far and above what I'm used to reading regarding smartphone reviews. Many thanks for that!Looking forward to similar articles in the future.
medi01 - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
Epic, right, and you don't care that Apple's device is visible where it has advantage but is not shown, where it doesn't. Like on contrast comparison images.Misterious.
Exodite - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
No, can't say I mind that at all really.Then again I'm not in the market for an iPhone anyway.
Brian Klug - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
I actually completely spaced on that one - I probably had a 3GS in my pocket when I took those photos.There's no conspiracy - I just thought that the Incredible's AMOLED display would make an interesting comparison with the Motorola Droid's LCD, and the N900's resistive layer would mix things up a bit.
The iPhone screen really shows its age in the numbers from the bench though. It leaks light pretty badly and obviously the lower PPI is... well... bad.
Cheers,
Brian
Rayb - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
Nokia has been making devices that work without much hoopla for a long time. It is not for everyone but it beats the available iPhone in more useful ways than is possible.Helmore - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
The Adrena 200 is based on the AMD Z430 GPU. A Z340 does not even exist AFAIK.I know, I'm nitpicking here, but I just thought I had to mention it.
The Adreno 200 runs at a frequency of 133 MHz, giving it a theoretical performance of 133 MPixels/s of fill rate and 22 Million Triangle/s. The Adreno 205 is the same core but running at 200 MHz and is what will be used in the MSM7X30 and QSD8X50A (45 nm version of the current Snapdragon chip with some small tweaks). The SGX530 used in the Droid (OMAP3430) runs at around 100 MHz, which should give it a theoretical fill rate of 250 MPixels/s and a 7 million Triangles/s. On the OMAP3630 the SGX530 will run at 200 MHz AFAIK. That's all theoretical performance, as we all know they're only part of the story. Just take a look at the GTX480 and the Radeon 5870 and you'll know that theoretical performance doesn't get you very far.
fabarati - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
1) there was a mistake on the N900 hardware page: it's a 3.5 mm jack, not a 1.8 mm. You probably mixed it up with 1/8"2) The N900 can do Video calling over 3G, like most 3G phones in Europe have done since 2003. It works ok, but it's hella expensive, so no one does it more than once or twice.
Brian Klug - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
Fixed! Thanks!-Brian
wobblysausage - Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - link
Lies! It cannot make a 3g video call.It can make a skype video call (or a google chat video call) over a 3g data connection but this is not the same thing. Not nearly.
I've had my N900 since November and this is the 1 thing I really miss.