Smartphones are pretty quick these days, offering buttery smooth multi-tasking and packing enough grunt to push out plenty of pixels for...
Smartphones are pretty quick these days, offering buttery smooth multi-tasking and packing enough grunt to push out plenty of pixels for high resolution gaming. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the world of smartphones was quite different not so long ago. So, let’s take a little time to appreciate just how far our little smartphones have come.
We could spend ages talking through every new chip, technological breakthrough and chip design under the sun, but I just can’t bring myself to type out that many model numbers, instead let’s talk performance. Although benchmarks might not be perfect, they’re not a bad guide to theoretical peak performance between devices running the same test. GeekBench is one of the more reliable and has achieves that go back quite a way, so we’ll be pulling some data from there.
Android vs iOS
There’s no better place to start than the old Android vs Apple grudge match, so let’s delve back in time to see who topped the smartphone benchmarks each year. Apple may have been the first on the market all those years ago, but it’s an advantage that Android has been very quick to close in on.
Much as it did back then, Apple still has a heavy input into the design of its smartphone SoCs, while Android mostly relies on big market players to provide chips for a range of products. Perhaps not unexpectedly, it’s been a close run race for several years, but the past couple have seen an interesting trend emerge. Apple’s iPhone range has built a steady lead with single core performance, while the best Android phones have leapt ahead with multi-core performance.
We can directly correlate this large jump in performance to the introduction of big.LITTLE octa-core SoCs, while Apple remains more interested in per core performance. We have previously discussed how Android makes use of multiple cores and this is helping Android see notable performance gains in certain scenarios, as well as aiming to improve battery life in less demanding tasks.
Performance by brand
Android is a big place, so it’s only right to examine the broader competition. For this chart we’re looking at the major flagship releases each year from some of Android’s biggest global brands. It’s tricky to find data on every handset, but should give us a rough idea about where the competition has been.
This chart nicely demonstrates Motorola’s shift to and from the mid-tier market, while LG managed to keep up with the big players in the market thanks to its Nexus handsets. Samsung has consistently held a position at the front of mobile processing technology, partly thanks to its own range of Exynos Socs, as has Sony, for the most part.
We shouldn’t be surprised to see a close run race between all of the big Android players, as most smartphones have been making use of the same processors in each generation, many of them from Qualcomm. The only real performance differences tend to last a few months, as companies race to be the first to the next milestone.
This past few years have been an interesting period in the mobile SoC arms race, as manufacturers leapt from the older Qualcomm S4 designs up to faster, quad-core chips and finally into the octa-core behemoths of today’s handsets, all in the space of just two to three years. Samsung managed to leapfrog the competition with its octa-core big.LITTLE Galaxy Note 4 at the end of 2014 and seems to have maintained a notable advantage this year thanks to its 14nm technology. Other companies have transitioned over to Qualcomm’s own Snapdragon 810 octa-core chip this generation, but is a tad behind on a 20nm manufacturing process.
LG has seen the slowest rate of improvement in the past few years, having been early into the Snapdragon 800 series with the Nexus 5 but then choosing to avoid the more recent 810 in favour of Qualcomm’s hexa-core 808 for its LG G4.
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