[Epic 4G General] Electrofreak:
I've spent the better part of a year studying ARM hardware and architecture in the majority of my spare time. I've been published to tech blogs and I'm regularly consulted by major tech portals. It frustrates me when I try to explain things and people just throw back "ur wrong".

The 800 MHz processor in the G2 is slower than the 1 GHz processor in the Epic. It's an empirical fact. Less MIPS, less clock cycles. Put the MSM7x30s at 1 GHz and they'll very likely beat the Epic, but they're not at 1 GHz, they're at 800 MHz.

I'm still trying to figure out how Qualcomm has accomplished this since the Scorpion isn't much changed from the one in the QSD8x50. Unfortunately, finding out anything about Qualcomm's chips is virtually impossible with the insane level of secrecy they throw over their architecture (this is because it's a custom architecture instead of a customized ARM design).

Kenvan, nobody is saying it's a bad phone (at least I'm not). What we are saying that, in terms of both CPU and GPU, it's a hardware downgrade to switch to the HTC EVO Shift 4G from an Epic 4G. I will go on record and say that the benchmark results have been surprisingly good for the HTC EVO Shift 4G (since Hummingbird bested 1st-gen Snapdragon's Scorpion core MHz for MHz). The 2nd-gen chips have definitely had some sort of serious tweaking done to allow them a ~15% improvement in processing power over the original design.

I've had to come to Qualcomm's defense regarding the quality of their work in Snapdragon on numerous occasions; the SoC takes a lot of heat for an aging GPU (an issue that the 2nd-gen chips have partially rectified). But one thing most people don't realize is that, since Qualcomm buys rights to an instruction set instead of a CPU, they custom-design their chips from the bottom-up. Snapdragon is loosely-based upon Cortex-A8, but also has had some significant changes, including some out-of-order instruction support, a 128 bit bus, and memory controller enhancements in addition to the numerous changes to the instruction set. Unlike Qualcomm, most companies like Samsung and TI buy the rights to an ARM processor architecture, and just tweak it. Marvell is the only other one that I know of that follow's Qualcomm's example.

The result of all this is that companies like Samsung can only tweak the hell out of an existing CPU configuration (or hire someone else to do it for them), but they can't make major changes without buying the rights to the instruction set. Qualcomm can, which costs them a lot more money in R&D and licensing but allows them to be a bit more nimble in the market; they don't have to wait for ARM to release a better SoC, they just design a better one. I think the MSM series is an example of that; obviously the 800 MHz performs significantly better than a 1st-gen Snapdragon does at the same clock speed, but Samsung would be hard-pressed to accomplish the same using Hummingbird.

Now, Qualcomm could have thrown either a dual-channel memory controller into the MSM chips, or just support for LPDDR2 > 400 Mbps per channel. Memory bandwidth is a frequent bottleneck in modern smartphones. But more likely, they made changes to the instruction set itself.

I hope you guys will read my article if you want to know more details. I'll link it from my blog as it links to some other posts and further speculation: http://sean-the-electrofreak.blogspot.com/2010/03/hummingbird-vs-snapdragon-1ghz.html