Phone and computer CPU comparison

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

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Sorry, please move this to the phones section. Thanks Dons.

Phones are hitting nearly 2GHz now, with multiple cores, at least 1GB of RAM and some are 1080p as well. This spec is equivalent to probably a late 2007 PC with Core2Duo processor and HD-ready, so phones are catching up.

Is there a benchmark to compare PCs and phones clock-for-clock? Also, how does the Tegra series of graphics chips compare to the various GT and GTX cards?

I'm still on a Sammy SII, but am interested to learn of any app that really taxes it. For example, I have a racing game called SpeedX 3D which is a nice demo for graphics and the SII handles it well. Just looking for similar, gaming or otherwise.
 
Power is and always will be the issue for mobile devices. Little point having a fast chip if it's going to eat the battery even on standby.
 
I was wondering about this the other day.

Clock speeds are always increasing and beats some new pc's out there today but I'm assuming the architecture is of a far simpler design?
 
MonkeyMan said:
I was wondering about this the other day.

Clock speeds are always increasing and beats some new pc's out there today but I'm assuming the architecture is of a far simpler design?
Click to expand...

Most phones run on ARM architecture which uses a simpler instruction set.
In layman terms, it takes an ARM processor more cycles to accomplish the same task that it would take an x86 (desktop) computer to complete.

That said, the reduced complexity allows the processors to run at higher clockspeeds and use less power, so it's a good balance.

Interestingly, the Motorola Droid RAZRi uses an Intel Atom Z2460 (2GHz single core) processor which is a true x86 CPU, it's currently the only x86 android device on the market.
In terms of processing power, It competes quite respectably with 2nd Generation Netbooks or with mobile-CPU Laptops from about 2004 :)
 
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Phone CPU's are nowhere near as powerful as desktop cpu's at comparable clock speeds, just see how fast they can calculate one million digits of pi.
 
Aod said:
Interestingly, the Motorola Droid RAZRi uses an Intel Atom Z2460 (2GHz single core) processor which is a true x86 CPU, it's currently the only x86 android device on the market.
In terms of processing power, It competes quite respectably with 2nd Generation Netbooks or with mobile-CPU Laptops from about 2004 :)
Click to expand...

Not quite, the Orange San Diego also has the Atom Z2460!
 
I've always thought it was difficult to compare processors of different architectures, especially since ARM is completely different from x86 (RISC vs. CISC).
 
nath247 said:
Battery life is a problem though.
Click to expand...

Depends on the phone. A half decent laptop will get 4-8 hours of solid use. You also have to note that phones with dual/quad cores won't be running at max speed at all times, like computers they will slow down to as low as 200MHz when not doing anything taxing.

Phones like the Note 2 can get 2 days of use with ease and in general be used exactly as you would a laptop, maybe even more convenient given how easy today's phones are at beaming media to a SmartTV set.
 
scrlk said:
I've always thought it was difficult to compare processors of different architectures, especially since ARM is completely different from x86 (RISC vs. CISC).
Click to expand...
This is the real crux - Mobile CPUs don't use anywhere near the same instruction set and thus comparisons are really not going to work on a workhorse level.
 
You can't compare new mobile devices to desktop parts these days and it's nothing to do with ARM vs x86...

It's all about TDP (general sustained performance) vs SDP (scenario burst performance)

A quad core cortex A15 based phone will have higher burst performance than most pre-Nehalem laptops but only for a few seconds :p
 
Cheers for the answers guys. I know it's a more complex question nowadays than, say, the 1990s when it was just about chasing the megahertz. Then the Millennium came and CPUs gained extra cache, hyperthreading, more cores, more levels of cache, even more cache and so on, which makes it harder to quantify 'CPU speed'. Is there a single ultimate stat that can be calculated from all of the above criteria so that it is easier to compare i5/i7 processors vs Atom processors vs phone processors, or is it not as easy as that? I might have the wording wrong, but I was thinking along the lines of 'floating point value'?
 
Raw FLOPS performance? Nvidia Tesla K20! :p

I guess your after a useless theoretical performance list like this? > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second

Intel Core i7 2600K: 128,300 MIPS at 3.4 GHz
AMD FX-8150: 108,890 MIPS at 3.6 GHz
AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition: 42,820 MIPS at 3.0 GHz
Samsung Exynos 5 Octa: ~35,000 MIPS at 1.8 GHz (1.2Ghz for cortex A7 cluster)
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800: 27,079 MIPS at 2.93 GHz
AMD E-350: 10,000 MIPS at 1.6 GHz
Qualcomm S4 dual core: 9,900 MIPS at 1.5 GHz
Intel Atom N270: 3,846 MIPS at 1.6 GHz

As you can see the latest Exynos 5 gets close to a 3Ghz AMD Phenom II X4 and smashes core 2 Intel chips :D
 
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