Does the processor found inside your mobile device really matter? The average consumer doesn't care what CPU is featured inside their smartphone, but it's always a popular topic among the hardcore crowd. Today's hottest mobile chips are NVIDIA's Tegra 3 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4, so we put them through a round of benchmarks and experiences to see which came out on top. The results might surprise you, so read on for the full details.
Devices
Finally, we have both the Snapdragon S4 and Tegra 3 version of the HTC One X. We wanted to keep things simple, so we only used three devices. I decided to go with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus as the third device since it is currently Google's flagship Android device.
Note: Our international HTC One X just received the 1.29 firmware update as we were working on this post, so we will update the benchmarks scores with new results if we find anything differs.
Benchmarks Used
For this round of testing, we used most of the popular Android benchmarks that are freely available in the Google Play Store. We decided to exclude Vellamo Mobile Web Benchmark since it is developed by Qualcomm. Linpack was also excluded because it's a benchmark intended for use on supercomputers and it doesn't produce consistent results on Android. Finally, for all browser benchmarks we used the latest Chrome Beta, since each device has a different default browser.
Processing Benchmarks
Winner – Tegra 3: Not many apps are optimized for quad-core, but several benchmarks are. Tegra 3 manages to score a healthy lead in Antutu, CFBench, and Smartbench. In Quadrant we see Snapdragon S4 eke out a close victory, but the results are within the margin of error.
Graphics Benchmarks
Winner – Tegra 3: Both GPUs appear to be pretty evenly matched, but we give the slight advantage to Tegra 3.
