Motorola Droid X: Thoroughly Reviewed

CPU and General Use Performance

Snapdragon is what Qualcomm calls its SoC, but the CPU itself is called Scorpion. Scorpion is very similar to ARM’s Cortex A8, but with potentially twice the Neon (SIMD FP) throughput. In day to day use however, I don’t expect to see a huge difference between the Scorpion and A8 CPU cores used by Qualcomm and TI respectively.

We’ll start with the targeted browser tests, first SunSpider. A javascript performance test, this benchmark is completely network independent but it measures the performance of the browser as well as the underlying hardware.

SunSpider shows the Droid X roughly on par with the Nexus One running Android 2.1, and a bit slower than the HTC offerings. This benchmark is as much of a software test as it is a hardware one since the move to Froyo (Android 2.2) cuts benchmark times in more than half.

The performance delta from the original Droid to the Droid X is extremely pronounced here. The Droid is just plain slow, and to think it wasn’t that long ago that we were begging manufacturers to use the Cortex A8. The X is a major step forward compared to last year’s high end smartphones.

Next up is the Rightware BrowserMark. This test combines JavaScript and HTML rendering performance:

BrowserMark puts the Droid X in the same league as other Android 2.1 phones. In terms of real world web browsing it doesn’t look like there’s any real difference between the OMAP 3630 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon.

Turning an eye towards the real world we have a WiFi web page loading test. Here we’ve got a local copy of the AnandTech front page and we’re loading it over WiFi. Note that these results can’t be compared to previous tests as they are running in a slightly different environment than in previous reviews.

The lower level synthetic CPU tests mostly echo our findings thus far - there's very little difference in CPU performance between the OMAP 3630 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon.

The Linpack and Pi tests are very much compiler benchmarks as well as platform tests. We’ve actually had to remove the Froyo Nexus One results from the Linpack graph simply because they make the graph unreadable - Froyo is nearly 3x the speed of the fastest Android 2.1 phone here.

On a relatively level playing field, with all phones running Android 2.1, the Droid X is around twice the speed of the original Droid. The OMAP 3630 even holds a performance advantage over Snapdragon in this test. While Linpack as a workload isn’t very representative of what most people will do with their phones, it is a great FP and cache benchmark.

From a CPU and platform perspective, TI’s OMAP 3630 appears to be just as fast as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoC. The two perform very similarly across the board regardless of benchmark. The OMAP most visible advantage is in its GPU. The PowerVR SGX 530, especially running at 200MHz in the OMAP 3630, is at least 50% faster than the present day competition in other Android phones. It should be similar to performance offered by Apple’s A4.