Apps Snapdragon or Hummingbird ?

[Slice28]

Which one do you think is the better processor. Check out this video to see some comparisons of the two as well as the droid x's processor.

 

[BenChase7]

theyre all pretty good. i guess if youre into gaming you may lean towards the hummingbird.

 

[pingpongboss]

The CPU of the snapdragon and OMAP3 is virtually the same. The difference comes from the GPU.

The OMAP's gpu seriously kicks the Snapdragon gpu's ass. Anandtech did some benchmarking on this issue a few days ago.

 

[damewolf13]

I have not watched the video yet, and I am not a gamer, but I will say that I own both the Evo, and the Vibrant, and the Evo is SOOOOOO much faster at transitioning.
I am so disappointed in the lack of snappiness of the Hummingbird processor.

 

[PaulMcCartney]

The Hummingbird (ARM Cortex A8) is definitely the most powerful of the three.

It gives you more performance-per-clock and runs on a 45nm process, allowing it to clock at 1Ghz.

 

[facekl]

I have not watched the video yet, and I am not a gamer, but I will say that I own both the Evo, and the Vibrant, and the Evo is SOOOOOO much faster at transitioning.
I am so disappointed in the lack of snappiness of the Hummingbird processor.

Its probably from laggy Samsung software rather than the chip itself. Why couldn't they just use stock. Touchwiz is clunky, ugly, and slow.

 

[damewolf13]

Its probably from laggy Samsung software rather than the chip itself. Why couldn't they just use stock. Touchwiz is clunky, ugly, and slow.

Could be true.

 

[TheBlackPrince]

All three are more than adequate for Android. The Hummingbird might be the way to go if you do a lot of 3D rendering (ie Games). Otherwise I don't see why the processor would be a huge factor in determining which phone to buy between these three.

 

[EarlyMon]

OK - for starters, the OMAP36x0 (X), Snapdragon 8x50 (EVO) and Hummingbird S5PC100 (Galaxy-class) are all variants of ARM Cortex A8 cores. References provided upon request.

Not that that really matters - the Android native development kit - that is to say, the part of the tools that lets developers fine-tune for highest performance - kit goes as high as ARMeabi v7A with NEON and VFP support (along with thumb, thumbee, edsp and fastmult). See:

Android NDK | Android Developers

Bottom line - if all you can get to are ARM v7 features with extensions - then that's all you'll see for performance.

For graphics, using the critical Mtps (millions of triangles per second) benchmark:

Hummingbird s5pc100 - 10 Mtps
Snapdragon 8x50 - 22 Mtps
Omap 3640 - usually benchmarked in the same range - 20+ Mtps

SAMSUNG's Digital World

Qualcomm Products and Services - The Snapdragon? Platform

Ruminations on various benchmarks for the OMAP 3600s, Hummingbird, and Snapdragon | AlienBabelTech

Bottom line - none of these are particularly bad GPUs.

Part of the real debate would include the DSP chips - together with the GPUs, they're responsible for video and image processing.

The Snapdragon has a higher speed DSP than the OMAP3 - but, TI claims better pipelining for their unit, so it could either way or be a toss-up.

As for benchmarks:

A good OMAP 3640 vs snapdragon vs humming bird article - xda-developers

Let's look at AnandTech again:

Motorola Droid X: Thoroughly Reviewed - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

OK - frankly, their credibility is a little low right off because they identify the Apple's A4 chip as using an SGX535 when in reality it uses an SGX530.

They also persist in claiming that the Snapdragon uses an Adreno 200 GPU, and that's fine - except the part where Adreno seems to be the name for the integrated AMD Z430 and its accompanying DSP module. (Qualcomm did buy that AMD division, by the way.)

My problem with that particular benchmark is that so far as I recall, those same performance metrics (fps) seemed to apply to the Nexus One on 2.1 - but at 2.2, the Nexus ran just only a tiny bit faster than the Droid X - running at 2.1.

And frankly - unless something surprising happens - I think we'll end up seeing all of these processors leveling out with roughly the same performance with 2.2.

In fact, I think Moto knew this and that's why they backed down from their 2.2 release promise and went with 2.1 - everyone's simply convinced that they're going to see so much better performance with 2.2 - uh, ok, maybe.

OBTW - Anandtech was pretty clear that the Snapdragon uses a Scorpion instead of an ARM A8.

Mmmmk. Let's notice that a Scorpion IS kinda an A8... except for the part where a Scorpion uses a 128-bit parallel data path as opposed to 64 for a straight A8.

Inside DSP Articles

None of these are straight A8s - they're all pretty much equivalent variants.

The benchmarks are just showing overall performance with a given software stack.

And because the software stacks vary, we know next to nothing about the processor performance differences other than how interesting they are.

By the way - just one more beeyotch slap against Anandtech - the Snapdragon 8250 and the 8650 are 100% identical - except for which 3G radio chipset they talk to. So - that should prove completely that they didn't benchmark GPUs like they said.

They benchmarked phones and talked about GPUs - instead of their software stacks.

Useless.

We get to do it again with the Hummingbird S5VP210, Snapdragon 8672 and the OMAP4 processors when those are fielded.

 

[EarlyMon]

The Hummingbird (ARM Cortex A8) is definitely the most powerful of the three.

It gives you more performance-per-clock and runs on a 45nm process, allowing it to clock at 1Ghz.

A 45 nm process - such as that used in the construction of the X's OMAP3 and the Hummingbird - can indeed give higher speeds - or better (lower) power consumption - or a bit of both.

This current species of Snapdragon was built with a 65 nm process. (The 45 nm versions have been out for a while.)

All three are running at 1 GHz - and all three are ARM A8 variants.

We already know that the Nexus One and EVO running 2.2 will get at and above the Droid X at 2.1 - with all doing in the 55~60 fps neighborhood.

Unless you're going to try to run one of the games that can exceed 100 fps - and that's presuming that someday, someone ports such a thing to Android - I hardly expect the difference in visual performance to be noticeable, personally.

Obviously, I'm not a gamer - but I've never talked to one who's satisfied with any fps spec.

 

[shroomy]

Awesome post EarlyMon. I just wanted to say thanks for writing all that, as well as including links. It was very informative.

Maybe this is old news, but just in case it's not:

TI touts OMAP4 with do-it-all development platform - News - Linux for Devices

SVTronics

Be sure to watch the vid. As a side note, it is kinda cool that one could order the blaze processor upgrade kit and get an omap4. As far as I know it's the only way to get a cortex A9 based chip unless you're a large volume developer.

Edit: Or maybe not, seeing as the tegra 250 dev kits are available, but you do have to apply.

 

[Shocky]

Hummingbird and Droid X's OMAP are very competitive and clearly faster than snapdragon.

Quite revealing that users here vote for the slowest cpu as fastest, there either HTC fanboy’s or they just don't have a clue.