This Just In: LG Optimus 2X, Our First Tegra 2 Smartphone
by Brian Klug on January 27, 2011 1:55 PM EST- Posted in
- This Just In
- Smartphones
- LG Optimus 2X
- Android
- Mobile
Update: Our full review is now live!
It's been 22 days since we saw the Tegra 2 packing LG Optimus 2X at CES, and just moments ago the device arrived at our doorsteps ready for a thorough reviewing. It's out of the box and charging now, ready to enter our battery life tests, but before that we managed to grab a bunch of photos and a few quick benchmarks.
First off, our model is European-spec and likewise came with a Type-C power adapter. Luckily we've got tons of microUSB chargers laying around. Our unit's packaging is definitely not final, as it came in just a black box with the accessories, but that's hardly an issue, what we're interested in is some Tegra 2 performance. Physical feel and appearance is almost exactly how we left it at CES.
Some quick benchmarks show Tegra 2 performance definitely leading in the browser area. Note that the Optimus 2X is shipping with Android 2.2.1. Gingerbread (2.3) was launched on Samsung's Hummingbird so it'll take a little while to port it over to NVIDIA's hardware. Honeycomb (3.0), on the other hand, will launch on Tegra 2 hardware once more.
Note that most of the performance advantage NVIDIA currently holds in these tests is between 12 - 25%. This implies that Qualcomm's 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon due out later this year could be performance competitive with NVIDIA's dual-core Cortex A9 Tegra 2. We still have a lot more benchmarking to do in order to properly characterize and understand NVIDIA's Tegra 2 performance in a smartphone however.
Linpack performance is a bit behind the latest from Qualcomm, but that's more telling of FPU performance and cache bandwidth than most real world smartphone apps:
We've got a lot more to run on the LG Optimus 2X, but so far it looks impressively speedy, just as expected.
Update: We've taken our usual video samples from the Optimus 2X, and uploaded them to YouTube and our own servers in a big (147 MB) zip. Full analysis will come with our larger review.
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KaarlisK - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
It seems that soon enough netbook CPU's should start to appear in the benchmark graphs...strikeback03 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Are there going to be single-core A9 chips? It will be interesting to see if any version of Android prior to Honeycomb can make use of the second core.vol7ron - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/co...Second paragraph: "Available as either a single core or configurable multicore processor, with both synthesizable or hard-macro implementations available." It seems it can use MPCore to even go up to "4 cores".
I thought the whole thing about the dual core was not to have two CPUs, but to have one logical core and one off-core for other specific tasks. To reduce power and speed up instruction processing. As long as it's faster, I don't care :)
http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/926#4
Wow - I know the icons aren't exactly the same, but did they have to use the same color scheme as the iPhone?
bplewis24 - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Does Apple have a patent on icon color schemes now?alphacheez - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
YieldsTotal: 47256.0ms +/- 2.0%
so I'm looking forward to an upgrade in the first half of this year probably
jasn - Sunday, January 30, 2011 - link
Tegra 2 seems like an amazing piece of silicon (and so other Cortex-A9 chips), buy i will most probably buy nexus S next month. Pure google android FTW!scottb75 - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - link
On my overclocked Nexus S (1.4 GHz Trinity CM7 Kernal) I ran some of these benchies myself and scored the following:Sunspider 0.9.1 benchmark: 3147.4ms
Rightware BrowserMark: 57144
Linpack: 19.379 Mflops
Quadrant CPU Benchmark: 7357 (3136 overall score)
The Optimus 2X is impressive but nothing above and beyond what is capable with Android devices currently available. Then again the Tegra 2 could have a lot of overclocking potential as well and really blow away my Nexus S, but that remains to be seen. Also as some have pointed out the LG Optimus 2X is running Android 2.2 which doesn't officially support dual-core processors (why they put 2.2 on this device at launch is beyond me), while 2.3 does support dual-core which could really turn up the speed on the Optimus once the Optimus gets upgraded.
Electrofreak - Saturday, February 5, 2011 - link
I'm a very verbal opponent of Quadrant as a benchmark as it does a terrible job of producing values that reflect real-world results. It's an easily manipulated (I got my Epic 4G on 2.2 to produce a score of 2597) and has real issues producing accurate I/O results on phones using the RFS file system.I hope to see some newer benchmarks used in the future. BaseMark looks very promising, and I'd also recommend SmartBench 2010 as he's been working closely with the XDA Developer community to produce an excellent benchmark. I know that he's also working on dual-core support in SmartBench 2011.
Benchmark comparisons are only as accurate as the software we use to run the test. I'd be interested to see an article that went into comparing the accuracy of benchmark software. This could be accomplished benchmarking phones with different benchmark applications against one another using a number of different applications and looking for outliers in the benchmark scores.
Just a suggestion! :)