Galaxy Nexus & Ice Cream Sandwich: Initial Performance Analysis
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 18, 2011 11:42 PM EST
The road to Google's Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is finally nearing its destination. As of yesterday, the Samsung made Galaxy Nexus went on sale in the UK. Its arrival in the US on Verizon is imminent, but it'll still be another couple of weeks before we can get our hands on a CDMA/LTE sample.
The Galaxy Nexus hardware platform isn't a significant departure from what we've already seen on Android. TI was chosen as the launch silicon partner with its OMAP 4460. The SoC takes a pair of Cortex A9 CPUs running at 1.2GHz and gives them a dual-channel LPDDR2 memory interface to talk to. The GPU is Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX 540. The CPU side of things is comparable to Apple's A5, although the cores are clocked noticeably higher than the 800MHz we saw in the iPhone 4S. Until Tegra 3 and Krait show up, the CPU side of the 4460 is as good as it gets.
The real advantage the Galaxy Nexus has is on the software side. All of the goodness of Honeycomb makes its way to a handset along with even further optimization work. One of the early Galaxy Nexus owners ran the usual browser benchmarks on his phone and shared the results with us. Google has obviously done a lot of browser optimization in ICS as performance is now better than even Honeycomb:
The GPU in the Galaxy Nexus isn't bad by any means - the SGX 540 is competent, but it is outgunned by ARM's Mali 400 (Samsung Exynos 4210) and the SGX 543MP2 (Apple A5). As I mentioned earlier, the Galaxy Nexus wasn't about putting the fastest hardware in a phone but rather providing a stable vehicle for Ice Cream Sandwich. Results for the Galaxy Nexus have been in the GLBenchmark database for a while and show an overall improvement over previous SGX 540 implementations (the GPU clock in the 4460 is higher than in the 4430):
Performance is pretty much as expected in both areas: Google really pushed the performance of its software further with Ice Cream Sandwich, while GPU performance is limited by the SGX 540. The good news is that there's more than enough hardware at ICS' disposal to deliver a smooth experience. We'll be able to quantify that once we get our hands on a device.
Source: GLBenchmark, @SigThief
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melgross - Saturday, November 19, 2011 - link
Effectively less, as they have been for all PenTile displays. Replyeallan - Saturday, November 19, 2011 - link
For all intents and purpose they are treated the same. Regardless of each pixel being 2 subpixels instead of 3, it's still a "pixel." ReplyZoZo - Saturday, November 19, 2011 - link
Indeed, they are all tested at 720p offscreen, it's mentioned under the title of the benchmark. So the GPU of the iPhone 4S is more than twice as fast, which isn't surprising considering that it's an evolution of the one in the Nexus, with twice the processing units. Replyjalexoid - Saturday, November 19, 2011 - link
It's 2x as fast in raw performance, but in more down to earth scenarios (Egypt) it's not that far ahead. I blame the memory interface in A5 for the lower scores. Replythunng8 - Sunday, November 20, 2011 - link
Not quite sure what you are talking about.In Egypt the iphone4S is 2.5x faster than the Nexus Galaxy and in Pro it is 2.7x faster. In both benchmarks to is significantly faster than 2X. Reply
itpromike - Saturday, November 19, 2011 - link
You are incorrect about that. Both phones were tested rendering Graphics at 1024x768 which also happens to be the same native screen resolution as the Galaxy Nexus. Essentially the iPhone 4S beats the Galaxy Nexus at it's own game(s) (Pun slightly intended). The iPhone 4S perform even better once bench marked at it's own native resolution. FYI the Graphic chip that's in the Galaxy Nexus is 2 years old and interestingly enough is the same GPU as the original iPhone4... so it's a bit behind. Nice phone though, just lacking on cutting edge performance in some areas. Replyeallan - Saturday, November 19, 2011 - link
How do you figure that's the nexus's native resolution? Replytipoo - Sunday, November 20, 2011 - link
Not true. The iPhone 4 used the 535, not the 540, and the 540 in the Galaxy Nexus is clocked higher than the 540 in the Nexus S you're probably thinking of, and looking at the benchmarks you can see its easily double the speed of the original 540, don't be fooled by a name. Not as fast as the 543MP2 of course, but its not the same old 540 either. ReplyHerp Derpson - Saturday, November 19, 2011 - link
Android has NO GAMES, so it doesn't need best gpu. SGX 540 is competent enoug to accelerate interface, decode video and has pretty decent performance. Also there isn't a single android video player that can use GPU to accelerate videos non-compatible with default player (like MKVs). Replyuwndrd - Saturday, November 19, 2011 - link
There is one video player with HW acceleration - DicePlayer. Go check it out, it has lite version or something. Reply