I
I-S
Guest
Greetings all. Allow me to introduce myself and explain my noob credentials before making my main point. I am an electronic engineer by day, and I am not a software person - assembler is as high-level as I am comfortable programming. My phone hacking credentials extend only as far as rooting and unlocking one galaxy S, and installing cyanogen 7 on a ZTE Blade, another Galaxy S and my personal Defy.
The blade was the first cyanogen install I did, and I did not find it to be spectacularly fast. However, on a 600MHz processor, was I expecting too much?
Next up was my defy. Oh my word... This is absurdly fast, as we all know. My phone scores 2100 in quadrant (for whatever that is worth - we know quadrant has its flaws).
Finally, I installed CM7 on a Galaxy S, and was marginally disappointed. Yes, it was a bit slicker than touchwiz, but not much. Quadrant of 1615, despite the significantly greater 3d capability of the SGS over the Defy.
So, some questions in my mind - Why does the Defy benefit so much, and how does it end up significantly outperforming the SGS when on paper they are pretty even with a slight advantage to the SGS - both 1GHz, both 512MB RAM, SGS has SGX540 and lower res screen (fewer pixels needing fill rate can potentially improve graphics framerates).
What it comes down to, I believe, is the RAM. The SGS has a strange memory architecture for its 512MB, with 128MB as "onedram" offering ~10GB/s speeds, required by the SGX540 and apparently solely dedicated to it. The remaining 384MB is LPDDR (1.6GB/s) and is what is available to the system (with CM7 reporting 342 total in about phone).
In contrast, the defy has 512MB LPDDR2 (3.2GB/s), which is all available to the system with dynamic allocation to the GPU when required. CM7 reports 477.
Therefore, in situations where the GPU is not being heavily used (which is most of the time for general system use) the Defy has much more and much faster memory for the system.
So it seems that the key for CM7 performance is memory speed and capacity, not necessarily processor power.
Should ICS come to the SGS with GPU-accelerated UI then I think the SGS would suddenly have a big advantage over all other single-core phones.
The blade was the first cyanogen install I did, and I did not find it to be spectacularly fast. However, on a 600MHz processor, was I expecting too much?
Next up was my defy. Oh my word... This is absurdly fast, as we all know. My phone scores 2100 in quadrant (for whatever that is worth - we know quadrant has its flaws).
Finally, I installed CM7 on a Galaxy S, and was marginally disappointed. Yes, it was a bit slicker than touchwiz, but not much. Quadrant of 1615, despite the significantly greater 3d capability of the SGS over the Defy.
So, some questions in my mind - Why does the Defy benefit so much, and how does it end up significantly outperforming the SGS when on paper they are pretty even with a slight advantage to the SGS - both 1GHz, both 512MB RAM, SGS has SGX540 and lower res screen (fewer pixels needing fill rate can potentially improve graphics framerates).
What it comes down to, I believe, is the RAM. The SGS has a strange memory architecture for its 512MB, with 128MB as "onedram" offering ~10GB/s speeds, required by the SGX540 and apparently solely dedicated to it. The remaining 384MB is LPDDR (1.6GB/s) and is what is available to the system (with CM7 reporting 342 total in about phone).
In contrast, the defy has 512MB LPDDR2 (3.2GB/s), which is all available to the system with dynamic allocation to the GPU when required. CM7 reports 477.
Therefore, in situations where the GPU is not being heavily used (which is most of the time for general system use) the Defy has much more and much faster memory for the system.
So it seems that the key for CM7 performance is memory speed and capacity, not necessarily processor power.
Should ICS come to the SGS with GPU-accelerated UI then I think the SGS would suddenly have a big advantage over all other single-core phones.
