Samsung Fascinate Review: Verizon's Galaxy S Smartphone

Performance

Anand declared the Epic 4G the fastest Android phone. I think it's safe to say that right now the Galaxy S is the undisputed performance champ for 3D, at least until we start seeing SoCs built around A9 MPCore with even more powerful GPUs. CPU wise, Hummingbird is running the same architecture ARM Cortex A8 at 1 GHz that we've seen in other SoCs. For now, the Fascinate's Hummingbird SoC with the PowerVR SGX 540 GPU is really what sets it apart. It's a significant improvement over the SGX 530/535, and if you haven't already, I'd encourage you to read what Anand had to say about it in the Epic review.

That improvement is readily apparent in Quake III, where the Fascinate posts unsurprisingly similar numbers to the Epic.

Likewise, we get similarly impressive Neocore numbers out of the Fascinate, which is Qualcomm's benchmark for showing off Adreno.

Though most of Android still can't take advantage of the SGX 540, applications that are rendered using OpenGL do show a massive performance boost. The qualitative difference between the stock Android gallery application on the Nexus One compared to the Fascinate is huge. On the Nexus One, it feels occasionally slow and choppy, yet on the Fascinate it's beyond smooth.

When the Android UI finally gets GPU acceleration, that huge performance gain will be readily apparent in everyday use instead of locked away for 3D apps and games.

Of course, our CPU-bound tests show almost exactly what you'd expect from a 1 GHz Cortex-A8. Bear in mind the Fascinate is running Android 2.1 as of these tests, but you can see how much Android 2.2 changes things - in some places.

As an aside, I talked in the Droid 2 article about how I didn't quite understand why Linpack performance on Android 2.2 on the OMAP 3620 SoC wasn't what I expected it to be. The comparison I was using was to all the smartphones I had previously seen with Android 2.2 - all of which were Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC based with Scorpion CPUs at the core. The Droid 2 was my first encounter with a relatively standard Cortex-A8 running Android 2.2 with the JIT/NEON optimizations.

As some of our readers noted, the reason that Linpack performance on the Droid 2 isn't as high is simple - Scorpion has faster FPU performance due to a 128 bit SIMD FPU datapath compared to Cortex-A8's 64 bit implementation. Both FPUs process the same SIMD-style instructions, the Scorpion just happens to be able to do twice as much, or optionally turn off half the datapath to save power.

The reason I bring this up is that we won't see as dramatic a change in benchmarks that are FPU/NEON heavy moving from Android 2.1 to 2.2 on the Fascinate. Modest gains are in order all around, but not the dramatic floating point performance boost that really doesn't translate into huge performance gains elsewhere.

I've also been doing the regular suite of page loading tests. Though the Fascinate lacks Flash and the faster browser that 2.2 brings, it renders pretty quickly: