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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DaveGirard - Saturday, June 12, 2010 - link
sweet Jesus, that Nokia phone is huge. Does it double as an ice cream sandwich cover?metafor - Sunday, June 13, 2010 - link
Cortex is the CPU designed by ARM. This is available as a hard-macro (layout already done) or soft-macro (just the functional RTL). Some companies license this in either version. For those who license the soft-version, such as TI, nVidia and Broadcom, they can do a customized place-and-route along with clock-tree optimizations and voltage partitioning to try to make the design run faster.However, the micro-architecture is the same.
A few companies have ARM architectural licenses (Apple, Qualcomm, Marvell) and instead of licensing the Cortex line of processors, they design their own. The micro-architecture is developed independent of what ARM did in their Cortex series albeit there will often be similarities.
Scorpion inside Snapdragon was developed in the course of years and while it has many similarities to the A8 from a power-point standpoint, the micro-architecture underneath was designed from the ground up. Everything from the branch predictors, the cache controller, exception handling, execution units and most notably, a partially OoOE scheduler and retirement buffer.
There's also the 128-bit, fully pipelined, partially OoOE SIMD/FP unit.
medi01 - Sunday, June 13, 2010 - link
Well, I find it very strange, that "incidentally" iPhone is never shown in bad light. Could you please update your side to side comparison?Impulses - Wednesday, June 16, 2010 - link
Personally I think there's better things for you guys to do or test with your time... Who cares if a phone's screen colors are more or less accurate, as long as they aren't outright flawed or ugly to look at it shouldn't be a big deal, not like anyone's gonna be doing any pro content editing work on their phones! (I don't even own an AMOLED screen so I'm not particularly biased one way or the other, I own an EVO atm)mojtabaalemi - Saturday, June 19, 2010 - link
I hate the design of nokia mobile phones . in my idea an iphone is far far better !paihuaizhe - Sunday, June 20, 2010 - link
(nike-alliance).(com)=>is a leading worldwide wholesaler company (or u can sayorganization)
arnavvdesai - Saturday, June 26, 2010 - link
I was just wondering if the author had installed AdBlock+ and then run the browser speed numbers or without it being on. If it was not installed which is what I am guessing from the photos, did you notice an improvement in the render times when it was installed. I actually bought the phone recently after seeing it on sale for 380$ and wanted to know the details. Also, I have heard that the current build of the OS allows potrait mode even for the browser(although it has to be activate through some setting) and not just the phone.drwiremore - Sunday, July 4, 2010 - link
Amanda, delighted to have found you. Given the issues in the title, affecting 20~50% of MOTO Droid users, was surprised to see no mention of it. The MOTO boards are alive with disdain and some feel an in you face attitude by Motorola Droid 2 and X announcements. Would you do an iPhone like analysis of voice, antenna and signal issues across Verizons Droids: HTC incredible and MOTO Droid. Your scientific analysis would be welcomed.