Motorola Droid X: Thoroughly Reviewed
by Brian Klug on July 20, 2010 4:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola Droid X
- OMAP
- Mobile
Years ago, before we hit the power wall, CPU innovation happened at a slow but steady pace. Every five years or so we’d get a new microprocessor architecture and every couple of years we’d get smaller transistors.
The smaller transistors made chips run cooler and at higher clock speeds. The shrink in die area also paved the way for new features, but between major architectural shifts those features normally came in the form of larger caches.
Texas Instruments’ move from the OMAP 3430, used in phones like the Palm Pre, to the OMAP 3630 used in the Droid X is reminiscent of this sort of steady progress I mentioned above.
The OMAP 3430 was built on a 65nm process (like Qualcomm's Snapdragon), while the 3630 is a 45nm shrink (like Apple's A4). Architecturally the two SoCs are very similar. They both use a standard ARM Cortex A8 CPU paired with an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 530 GPU. The two SoCs fit in the same size package (12mm x 12mm BGA) and are ball compatible. If a customer wanted to, it could simply drop in a 3630 into an existing 3430 design with minimal engineering efforts.
Note that the most direct competitor to the 3630 is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. While TI uses a standard Cortex A8 core from ARM, Qualcomm designed its own low power ARMv7 based core that is similar, but not identical to the Cortex A8. Both are dual-issue, in-order architectures - they’re like the original Pentium, but in your phone. Qualcomm also integrated the cellular modem into the Snapdragon SoC while TI’s OMAP 3 is a strict application processor - the modem is housed in a separate chip.
On the CPU side TI doubled the L1 cache of the 3430 to 64KB (32KB instruction, 32KB data). The L2 cache remains unchanged at 256KB. We won’t get a larger L2 until the OMAP 4, which will ship with a 1MB L2 shared among its two cores. There are the usual tweaks and bug fixes which may improve performance per clock a little bit over the 3430, but overall the 3630 just gets a larger L1 as a result of the die shrink - oh and a much higher clock speed.
The Cortex A8 now runs at up to 1GHz. The OMAP 3430 topped out at 800MHz in shipping configurations but most vendors ran it at sub-600MHz speeds to save power. The 3630 in the Droid X runs at a full 1GHz. It's worth pointing out that Qualcomm was able to hit 1GHz on a similar architecture at 65nm by designing its core from the ground up. There's clearly value in these custom designs from a performance and time to market standpoint. These advantages will only become more critical as the SoC performance wars heat up.
Power Consumption
The OMAP 3 as well as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoC support dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. Based on application demand and cues from the OS the CPU clock speed and voltage can vary. The Cortex A8 in the OMAP 3630 will drop down to the low 300MHz range when idle at the Android home screen and ramp all the way up to 1GHz when needed.
TI's OMAP 3630 running at full tilt
...and automatically underclocked to 446MHz under lighter load
This is nothing unique to the OMAP 3630, but it shows that frequency and voltage scaling is alive and well in Android.
TI supports full power and clock gating. All major IP blocks are placed on their own power islands, so based on input from the OS the CPU, GPU, video decoder, etc... can ramp down depending on the application needs at the time. The power and clock gating is no more granular in the 3630 than it was in the 3430. What has changed however are operating voltages.
While the 3430 needed 1.35V to hit 720MHz, the 3630 can reach 1GHz at around 1.26V. That still sounds a bit high to me but at the same clock speed, thanks to voltage scaling, you can drop power by around 30% compared to the 3430.
Coupled with the dynamic voltage/frequency scaling of all OMAP 3 parts this means that overall power efficiency should be better on the 3630 vs. the 3430. The added CPU performance in the form of larger L1 caches and a higher clock speed should make tasks complete quicker and allow the 3630 to get to a lower voltage state than the 3430 was ever able to reach.
Samsung has already shown off 1.2GHz+ versions of its Cortex A8 based SoC at 45nm, so I would expect to see higher clocked versions of the 45nm OMAP 3 family to follow at some point in time.
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Jonathan Dum - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
Thanks for the comprehensive and all around excellent review, but I have one caveat.As far as Android phones go, their multitouch screen controllers have tended to be sub par (try any multitouch on a nexus one, for example). I would like to know if there's any noticeable difference between these newest phones and older Android phones with capacitive screens.
As always, keep rocking these reviews, Anand. ;)
Frangible - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
I've not used another Android device, but it's hypersensitive compared to my iPad/iPod Touch. Portrait keyboard mode drives me nuts. If the touchscreen were alive, I'd say it would have a degenerarive demyelinating disease. Unfortunately putting prednsone tablets on my Droid X does nothing.It's so twitchy I can blow away the Blur, Swype, and even a modded HTC keyboard with Graffiti (free from Android Market btw). And that's Graffiti with my *thumb*, in portrait or landscape. If I started using my Pogo stylus... oh, it would be*on*.
Clearly, others don't share my opinion, but the touchscreen on the Droid X is incredibly fruuuuustrating at times.
Frangible - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
As a new Droid X owner, let me first say thanks for another great in-depth review, especially regarding the screeen details-- I just have to know these things, dammit.Anyway, just wanted to make two screen-related comments:
1. The outdoor screen comparison pics don't show any obvious transreflective displays. This either means none of them were, or they weren't angled in a way where a transreflective display would be obviously better.
FWIW, my iPod Touch Gen 1 has a TRD, and even my iPad's display is somewhat TRD (though with poorer contrast than the iPod or even a Tungsten TX in direct sunlight; a consequence of a lesser area of reflectivity, or the IPS display?) I don't know which of the iPhones have TRDs, but it would seem likely the iPhone 4G would be on par with the iPad.
Anyway, a TRD adds a LOT to outdoor viewing if you angle it correctly. You can even turn down, or off, the backlight.
The Droid X is certainly not TR, and was worse than my much dimmer Moto Q9C outdoors (due to the touch layer). And yeah sadly, the Tungsten Tx on min bright was better. So that's why I bring this up-- TRDs are the daywalkers of the LCD underworld, so imo this should be accounted for in outdoor comparisons.
2. I looked at the pixel structures of a variety of displays under a 100x light microscope. The Droid X's sub-pixels are divided into two sections, each with a black "hole". It looked quite similar to the PSP Go's subpixels, though with a standard RGB pattern and lack of the chevron textures on the PSP Go's. I assume this is some TN variant? Does anyone which kind?
The iPad's subpixels were divided into to halves of a series of stacked chevron color bars. Only the green subpixel had the "hole" (transistor?) which looked an awful lot like a mandlebrot fractal to me. FWIW.
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
I always love reading ATech's reviews, but this one was especially wonderful.I laughed out loud at the following sentence:
"Everything about the X seems like it can be followed up with a 'that’s what she said.'"
Simply hilarious.
The0ne - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 - link
Yes, I especially love some of the very technical tests as well. For example...1. I let my wife use it for a day and she likes it...
2. I work in milliseconds so having a webpage load 1s makes any other phone besides iphone a no go
3. I have no fcking clue about real multi-tasking, although I know it's been around for decades, but I'll just demand for it and do a bat-shit review of it.
4. My wife and kids love it so it's an editor's choice! Go buy it.
5. It only has a few thousand apps, not the millions and millions of apps like iphone so it's crap, regardless if many of those millions of shtty apps and dictated.
Obviously, I'm exaggerating the comments to the extreme but the basis is there. While at it the review might as well include the orgasmic scene from the movie "When Harry met Sally."
honkj - Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - link
for anyone wondering why that survey showed iPhone owners get more sex...this "theone" guy pretty much shows how clueless and geeky and "lady" hating, some Android fanboys come off to the opposite sex.....
actually they just come off as hating anything that moves.
jasperjones - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
a dozen comments already that point out the high quality of the review. it's getting boring. anyway, +1, excellent review. i've made critical comments on your smartphone reviews earlier this year. but the last couple of reviews were just awesome, and my confidence in AT is fully restored :)Hazdaz - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
It is so nice to read a review that is more than just a corporate press release. Actually taking the time to really review a device and give us honest and very thorough information is what I love about this site.I just ordered my X and won't get it for a few days, but I tested all the usual suspects and felt that it was the right phone for me... assuming I can get used to the size.
I know there are a few people that mentioned the GalaxyS family of phones and I have to say that I really wanted to get one... they are slightly smaller in size than the X, but because of their curved shape, they felt even smaller - while still offering a 4" screen. And about that screen, well it did look great, but from all the hype, I was really expecting for it to be even better. Anyways, I really wanted to like the phone - and I was ready to settle on it actually, until I tested the call quality. HUGE let down there... I could barely hear the person on the other end of the phone call, and the speakerphone volume was terrible. Tried this test on more than one version of the GalaxyS and was quite let down.
The Incredible actually had the best sounding speakerphone that I have heard, it was quite loud - but alas I was looking for something a little bigger in size. The X had good volume - much louder than the GalaxyS - so that's the one I picked.
ImmortalZ - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 - link
The gold contacts on the battery door are a staple of Motorola designs since a long time. My old E6 and it's cousin the Z6 both have gold contacts to the battery doors. So does the RAZR line. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that nearly every one of their phones with a metal battery door has multiple contacts from the door to the phone.MacTheSpoon - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 - link
The review was spectacular in many ways, but I couldn't find anything about call quality. Does this thing actually perform well as a phone? Did people you talk to think you sounded good, and did they sound loud and clear to you as well? How did it compare to other phones?Was this info in there somewhere, and I just missed it?