Android Benchmark: Tegra 2 Wins It All

This is the fastest Android phone for now, but others Tegra 2 handsets are coming...

The LG Optimus 2X has landed in our office, and we were curious about the actual performance of the NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC (system on a chip), so we ran a series of benchmark – the same that we used in recent reviews, and they confirmed what handset makers have been telling us “off the record”: Tegra 2 is the fastest silicon available in (volume) production today.

Interestingly, I suspect that those numbers don’t represent the full potential of the chip – particularly for the dual Cortex A9 CPU cores, and the graphics processor (GPU). Why? Because most of the apps have not yet been optimized for multi-threading. Also, the graphics benchmarks don’t use GL ES 2.0 shaders – at least, not in any realistic way.

The bottom-line? Tegra 2 has the muscles to make Web Browsing, Flash and 3D gaming faster than the competition, and Tegra 3 will do more of the same, but 2X or 3X faster. Performance numbers in the full post. Keep an eye out for our in-depth review of the LG Optimus 2X…

The Sunspider benchmark measures Javascrip performance, a critical component of web browsing performance for modern sites

GUIMark 2 measures Adobe Flash performance for displaying images that could be used in casual games

Neocore is a Qualcomm benchmark that measures simple 3D graphics performance

GPUBench runs effects using shaders, graphics programs that run on the graphics processor (GPU)