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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mikelward - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Wow, well spotted.Yet another disappointment.
Gunbuster - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Perhaps there will be a T-Mo specific version? Still that segments it and killls the chances for finding a hot deal.I just wish there was an option to do WiFi calling on non T-Mo branded handsets...
jk1 - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
can't change the battery and poor battery life, no slot for an sd card for media - this phone doesn't even make my list of phones to consider.rocketbuddha - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Yeah. Very disappointing. They seemed to willingly snatched Defeat from the jaws of Victory.No SD card expandability
Piss poor battery
No T-Mo LTE bands
Moto's ideal market would be ideally a no-contract carrier likeT-Mo or any of the MVNOs.
rocketbuddha - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Wierd.Based on the table infor provided FCC-ID =IHDT56QA1, it has support for
WCDMA in AWS [850, 900, AWS, 1900, 2100]
as well as Band 4 LTE. [2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 17, 29]
Those are TMO US bands. So what prevents us from using the phone on TMobile??
greyhulk - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
A little off-topic, but does anyone know what happened to Brian Klug? Does he do anything for Anandtech anymore?notposting - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
He went to Apple.bigboxes - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
It sounds like the commercial, "He went to Jarrod's!" But yes, Brian and Anand went to work for Apple.fokka - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
and they didn't mention it even once, not even in his long and heartfelt goodbye letter did anand say what is what.Xinn3r - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
AFAIK only Anand went to Apple.Brian is continuing Grad study, this is from what I've read on other comments.