The New Motorola Moto X (2nd Gen) Review
by Joshua Ho on September 17, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola
- Android
- Mobile
CPU and General Performance
By now, the choice of SoC has become a major focus in every smartphone. While it may not be clear how to use more compute with every generation, it’s generally accepted that stronger CPU and GPU performance is better, especially if it means that there is a power advantage in race to sleep tasks. In the case of the new Moto X we see a Snapdragon 801 SoC with CPU clocked at 2.5 GHz and a GPU clocked at 578 MHz. At this point, there's really not too much to talk about in this SoC as we've reviewed multiple devices with the same exact part.
Currently, our test suite relies upon a combination of browser and gaming benchmarks to get a good idea of total performance. However, it’s important to note that the Android results are only comparable to other Android phones as the stock browser will have specific optimizations that aren’t found in Chrome. We’ll start with the browser benchmarks first.
In the browser benchmarks, we see that the new Moto X falls right where we expect it to for the Snapdragon 801. It's plenty fast, and I don't expect any differences in CPU performance between Snapdragon 801 and 805 devices. This is unlikely to be a point of differentiation until Snapdragon 810 and beyond come into play. We'll take a look at Basemark OS II next, which is a general system performance benchmark.
Here, we once again see that there's not much different in terms of performance. We'll turn to the gaming benchmarks next to get a good idea of what to expect from the GPU.
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editorsorgtfo - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
IOS lockscreen notifications light up the screen for a short "glance time" without any handwaving. And yes, they murder stock Android, although L is supposed to remedy this?"It's hard to really explain because on the surface it seems rather mundane but after using Moto Display it's clear just how much time it saves. The glance time is just right to view notifications and the hand wave/approach action is effortless compared to pressing a home button or tapping the display."
editorsorgtfo - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
PS: IOS Lockscreen notifications don't need a separate low power cpu to preserver the battery, even without AMOLED.erikiksaz - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
The iphones don't need a separate low power CPU for the lockscreen notifications because they display *once*, then it goes dark until you manually pick up the phone.In the chance that you're not there to see the phone go off, Moto's implementation is superior.
BillT2014 - Saturday, October 4, 2014 - link
It's a very interesting review but so badly written. 25% is just unnecessary padding. Do you guys think we have that much time to waste?ritwik - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
But when you compare Moto X (2nd Gen) with Honor 6 you can see the difference that what Honor 6 is offering at such a reasonable price. You can see the difference here: http://wp.me/p5cjTD-critwik - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
I still feel my Huawei's Honor 6 is much superior to this device at a much better ratebadcoder - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
does headset comes along with new moto x 2014 box ...? or we should buy headset alone...badcoder - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
And what is the output size of voltage from stock charger of new Moto x 2014.... ?Klug4Pres - Thursday, January 15, 2015 - link
My comment on this review has been deleted - why?I posted a comment soon after publication, essentially saying something along the lines of "tiny non-removeable battery, no SD card, poor camera, oh well, I suppose it is a patriotic buy for Americans". This has vanished. Are the forums being censored now for un-American remarks or something?