[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] mysterioustko:
There have been a lot of people who have been doing comparisons of various phones (particularly the Galaxy S2) to the Galaxy Nexus. I recalled during the Samsung/Google event them saying they chose to use an industry leading hardware inside the phone, so I decided to look into this a little further. As I'm sure you're well aware, the first thing people tend to point at are benchmarks. The gpu benchmarks are particularly what have come under fire when people make their comparisons. Though the mali 400 does bench out higher than the SGX540 the higher performance on the mali isn't a tangible benefit as "end device applications have not yet caught up with the highest graphics performance delivered by these" (http://armdevices.net/2011/10/26/interview-with-the-texas-instruments-omap4-team/). In other words that's like having a road with a 300mph speed limit but the cars are only able to achieve 120mph. Driving on the road with the 300mph speed limit won't get you there any faster than driving on a road with a 200mph speed limit if the speed of the car is the same.

As for processors, the processors as they are now are roughly on par with each other with them both being 45nm A9's clocked at 1.2. The difference between them is that the exynos 4210 is clocked at it's true clock speed at 1.2, whereas the omap 4460 is actually underclocked to 1.2 and has a true clock speed of 1.5. Thus meaning the processor has more speed potential than that of the exynos.

One thing that does stand out as an advantage of the omap 4460 over some of the competition is it's memory bus bandwidth. For those that don't know, in simple terms, it's how fast information can be read from and stored to memory by the processor. In other words, you can have the fastest processor in the world but if you don't have enough memory bandwidth to accommodate the amount of information that needs to be transferred then that speed won't matter because it will be bottlenecked. For example, let's say you have a car that can reach 200mph and you want to drive that car at full speed. However the street you're driving on can only handle 20 cars at a time, and you're the 21st car, well in this case you're going to be stuck in traffic. Sure you have the raw potential of doing 200mph, but you won't ever get close to that because of traffic congestion. The same concept applies when we're talking about memory bandwidth. That being said, the memory bandwidth on the omap 4460 is 6.4GB/s, the exynos 4210 is 6.4GB/s, the iphone 4s is 6.4GB/s, and the Tegra 2 is 2.5 GB/s. Add all of this with the fact that the TI processor is underclocked to 1.2ghz (for power savings) as opposed to running at full strength and full power (ie. Galaxy S2), you have what is in my opinion the superior processor. Personally, I'd rather have an underclocked processor that delivers the same or better performance and saves me power, than to have a gpu that has excessive power that I can't even make use of. It's kind of like saying you have a rocket launcher for self defense, sure the rocket launcher is powerful but it isn't something you can really make use of. In closing I think AnandTech said it best when they said "Until Tegra 3 and Krait show up, the CPU side of the 4460 is as good as it gets."

Sources:

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/productInfo.do?fmly_id=844&partnum=Exynos 4210

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2911

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&...mA2j6n&sig=AHIEtbTE8LvpHXPUcE4w_wGU5apdbGD0Eg

http://armdevices.net/2011/10/26/interview-with-the-texas-instruments-omap4-team/

https://plus.google.com/105051985738280261832/posts/2FXDCz8x93s

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Why-...Galaxy-Nexus-Android-ICS-poster-child_id23089

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5133/galaxy-nexus-ice-cream-sandwich-initial-performance