yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Epic 4G General] A_Flying_Fox:
The g2's pocessor is underclocked to 800mhz. Its native is 1ghz. 1ghz g2 vs. 1ghz epic, there's a difference in mhz to mhz.

The hummingbird is more efficient and has a greater gpu. The next lass of sapdragon should be on par with hummingbird, but right now they're all sub par, including the g2's.
[Epic 4G General] thechicgeak:
I am not sure what you mean by "mhz to mhz", but the 800 mhz proc in the G2 is faster than the 1 ghz proc in the Epic. The fact that its downclocked doesn't change that. Nothing does. It is an empirical fact.
[Epic 4G General] kenvan19:
Go ahead and quote specs all day long but as someone who has held both and ran them side by side I can tell you that the ONLY downgrade is the graphics. I don't use a FFS and I don't know anyone who does so I apologize for not understanding why its that important. I ran it against my heavily modified Epic and in terms of processing my epic BARELY beat it. I used five separate benchmarking tools so please don't tell me spew the fact that quadrant skews towards snap dragons, my results were echoed in every test. Again, I am speaking only of its processing power. When it got to graphics it was a HUGE difference. The epic was more than double its power.
[Epic 4G General] kenvan19:
Dollars to donuts you've never run benchmarks or even just basic apps on both phones side by side. I have. You're wrong.
[Epic 4G General] 063_XOBX:
It's empirically denied. The hummingbird processor in the galaxy S is the fastest single core mobile phone processor out. Par none.
[Epic 4G General] thechicgeak:
A couple of things. First of all, asserting something as a fact is not asserting its truth. In other words, I was not claiming it was true (although I do believe it is) I was stating that it was fact. Secondly, Hummingbird *was* the fastest processor when the Epic came out. It is no longer. Show me proof otherwise or you are just blowing smoke.

I know you hate to think you don't have the best processor since you paid a lot for the phone, but that is what happens with technology. Something newer, better, faster, and stronger is always just on the horizon.
[Epic 4G General] ryno502:
I have played with the shift and to me the epic just feels more snappy. Id say they are pretty equal in speed. Doesn't really matter which one is faster because the difference is so slight.
[Epic 4G General] jpj526:
I wasn't "quoting specs". I simply posted a comparison chart so people could see the differences in the phones.

I just thought that it was relevant in case someone wanted to see what the differences were between the two devices.
[Epic 4G General] thechicgeak:
Electrofreak, I look forward to readng your article, it looks very well written. I don't have time to read through and post a thorough rely at this moment, but before that I wanted to clear a few things up. I hope you do not think I am trying to show the Epic is a "bad" phone (although I am disappointed by it), merely that the performance of its CPU is roughly that of the Evo Shift's and is even slower.

I would like to reiterate that I by "empirical fact" I was asserting that it was a fact and not its truth and that this fact is obtained by observation.

I will read your article and post a thorough reply later when I have time.
[Epic 4G General] kenvan19:
But what is the point of quoting a specification comparison sheet if not for quoting specs? And I should have been more accurate with my quoting as you are not the only one hung up on the numbers. Aside from either of those points, I was trying to illustrate the fact that in this case a decision should not be made based on company spec sheets or comparisons. Go try both of the devices and buy the one you like better. It has nothing to do with 'fan-boyism'. It has to do with the fact that as of recent history, HTC has been building more solid phones and supporting them for longer and with more fervor than Samsung. I used to sell TVs and I would recommend Samsung all the time based on their willingness to generally go above and beyond to support their televisions. However, this has not been the case with their phones and that is a major reason not to buy them.

I really appreciate all technical input as I always love to find out how and why things work so I enjoyed reading your post. Given what you have posted, my understanding would be that if (or more accurately, when) the Shift gets overclock to 1GHz or greater it will be performing at a greater level than the hummingbird chip. Am I understanding you correctly?

I also appreciate that it was not your purpose to say that the Evo Shift is a bad phone and I have not taken any of your posts to mean that however there are others who have said as much. Is the Evo Shift to my liking? Not really, its just a bit small. Does that mean its not the perfect phone for someone else? Absolutely not.

Finally, back to my point about the Shift having a much higher speed potential than the Epic, assuming I was correct in my understanding and understanding that this forum exists for the support and dissemination of mobile device modifications it is safe to assume that since such overclocking has been shown to do no harm to the G2 that there would be no reason to not run an overclock kernel on the device.

Actually, one more point: If you want a phone to play 3d games on, get the Epic. Period. Having run 3d rendering tests on the two phones side-by-side I can tell you that the Shift seems like a commodore 64 next to the Epic.
[Epic 4G General] thechicgeak:
I hope you are not trying to insinuate such a thing affects the truthfulness of your statements as that would be the logical fallacy of Argument from Authority.

I hope you are not referring to my behavior here. If you look back, I support my argument with references. Namely, GLBenchmarks and BenchmarkPi. I suggest you go there and you will see there are observed performance metrics that support my assertion.

That certainly is a fact (although I do not believe it to be true). Can you show me where there is empirical evidence that supports it? I have read your article, and it has some speculation on the performance of Snapdragon (1st generation, no?) vs Hummingbird, more specifically in the GPU department. I see no such speculation on the CPU performance (or observations either) of Snapdragon (2nd generation, which is in the G2 and Evo Shift, no?) vs Hummingbird. I do see where you speculate that it is significantly faster than 1st generation Snapdragon.

Ah you were referring to Kenvan there, please disregard that part of my last post then. My bad.

As far as I can tell, you have yet to provide anything to support that conclusion. I agree that I have seen so for the GPU, but not the CPU. If I am wrong, I would very much like to see some evidence to the contrary. I find this topic interesting and I always relish the chance to be disproven.

Agreed! Although I think the benchmarks show it is more than 15%. Indeed, your article says "Changes in core architecture also allow a 25% improvement in instructions that can be handled per clock cycle" when comparing 2nd gen to first. Please correct me and show me where I am contradicted, if I am mistaken...

You certainly know quite a bit about the architecture and details of the design of the chips in question here. That being said, I have yet to see where you provide evidence to contradict that the real world performance of the 800mhz processor in the G2 and Evo Shift is better than that of the Hummingbird in the Galaxy S series. Again, I love being dis-proven, it gives me the chance to learn new things. In your attempt to do so you have given me great insight into the architecture of the CPUs!

I see you mention in your article that AMOLED is more energy efficient than LCD. Specifically, that the SAMOLED is more energy efficient than the LCD in the Droid. While that is not the topic of discussion, everything I have read is to the contrary. I am anxious to see how you reached your conclusion! Can you please show me where that is demonstrated?

Near as I can tell though, you have committed the same sin that you indicted Kenvan for and merely asserted "you're wrong" without any references that backup your position (you did provide a reference, but I do not see how it supports your position, if anything it seems to support mine). Please demonstrate where you do so if I am mistaken here.

Lastly, I would like to thank you for posting such a mature and well-written response with many interesting facts. It is refreshing to see that in an Internet forum where anonymity frequently trumps grammar and writing skill. Thank you.
[Epic 4G General] jpj526:
I followed you until you quoted Wikipedia as source to backup your claims. I hope you aren't trying to insinuate that it is a credible source...since we're being so technical. ;)
[Epic 4G General] RushAOZ:
I hope everyone here remembers to insert the fact that 2.2 has not been released yet for the epic. As fast as these dev roms are they won't live up to they're potential once 2.2 is officially released and the devs get they're hands on the source code. Obviously the shift has been optimised to run 2.2 since that's what it shipped with. Throw in the fact that the jit compiler works much better with the snapdragons. Imo we should not be comparing our epics to the shift. If were talking performance I think the nexus s vs the shift is a better way to go... and if what I'm saying is valid theyres no competition. The numbers nexus s puts up blow the shift to bloody hell.

Seeing as these epics are nexus s phones with crippled software I think I for one have my answer.

To top it all off as I said when I played with both simoultaneously I felt the epic was faster snappier.

2 cents :)
[Epic 4G General] Electrofreak:
Not specifically, but behavior I've become far too familiar with.

That article was written back in March, and hosted in April. The 2nd-gen Snapdragons were naught but a rumor at the time, so I couldn't really speculate on them besides a few tips I'd seen dropped around the web. I should also point out that when that article was published, the Galaxy S and EVO had been only announced a couple weeks before, and thus had not yet been released, benchmarked, torn down, or even touched by the general public save attendants of CTIA 2010. I think I did well, considering.

I'll answer this one further down a bit. ;)

Actually, I mispoke, it is higher than 15%. 15% would be assuming the G2 / Shift were running at 1 GHz, which they do not. It is nearer to 25% given that the 800 MHz MSM is clearly outperforming the 1 GHz Snapdragon by a small margin.

Keep reading! I don't want to disappoint!

Actually I answered this in another thread today:

My statement about the Super-AMOLED being more energy-efficient than the LCD on the Droid was based upon Samsung's claims that the Super-AMOLED was 20% more power efficient than regular AMOLED such as the one in the Nexus One (claims which were later independently verified), and this article I dug up by a guy who knows his stuff: http://www.displayblog.com/2010/03/02/display-showdown-part-iid-iphone-3gs/

Don't be so eager, my friend.

Since you mentioned GLBenchmark: http://www.glbenchmark.com/compare....=1&D1=T-Mobile G2&D2=Samsung SPH-D700 Epic 4G

And again, Float values are affected by Snapdragon's Virtual Floating Point Engine and aren't an accurate comparison, as evidenced by the drastic difference. Unfortunately this is why Snapdragons score so well on Quadrant and Linpack. GLBenchmark shows that CPU Integer performance is better on the Epic 4G.

I can't really comment on BenchmarkPi (I still can't see where you referenced it but it's late) but I can tell you that one of the primary CPU tests in Smartbench 2010 is a Pi test, and follows is my (unremarkable) score. Notice that directly beneath is the G2:

(Green bar ~ CPU, Red bar ~ GPU)

Welcome.

On 2.2, likely yes. However, some guys are posting Smartbench 2010 Productivity scores of 1500+ for the Nexus S on 2.3, which we know has "further improvements to the JIT compiler" which could improve Hummingbird performance on Android (as it's currently tweaked for Snapdragon). Only problem is they haven't bothered to post their clock speed so it can't be certain if they're running an overclock. And, who knows how the Shift will perform on 2.3 as well.

Ooof. I'm goin' to bed. You guys have kept me up way too late!
[Epic 4G General] InfDaMarvel:
While the epic wins in hardware, the shift wins in overall support. Thus the shift imo is going to be a phone that will last longer. Considered a midrange phone but it still has highend specs until the dual procs release. Then even the epic will be nothing but mirange.

This sums everything up into a few lines.
[Epic 4G General] thechicgeak:
I agree with you that quoting Wikipedia is bad to support facts that are in contention, but Argument from Authority is a well known (and logically proven) concept. Wikipedia happens to frequently be an excellent tool to reference well known and agreed upon topics, and does a good job explaining what that fallacy is. In fact, Wikipedia has a very good proof right on the page. If you dispute it, I suggest you find a flaw in that proof.

YES! This is why I am finding it very refreshing to be having a discussion with someone who is not like that. :)

I think you did too! That 25% prediction appears to be very close to the true value. I will start this by saying I think that you have won me over. I am willing to cede that it does appear the Hummingbird is slightly faster than the G2 and not the other way 'round. My point about your article is that, while interesting, it did not support your conclusion. However, you bring up some points later in this post that do.

I would be surprised if the percentage increase in performance of 1st gen vs 2nd gen Snapdragon is not the same across the board. From what I have seen of CPUs, there tends to be a strong linear correlation between performance and clock speed within the exact same architecture.

Nice. I will have to read that later. I posted a similar sort of display comparison that revolved around image quality in another thread. The long and short of it was that while the screen on the Galaxy S was very good, the original Droid had the best screen of any smartphone to date.

I did not think about the fact that none of these processors have a floating point unit. Maybe you can answer as to why that is the case? Is it merely to save money or are there technical reasons that none of them have hardware FPUs? I would imagine the performance benefit could be significant.

Touché, good sir. This was exactly what I was looking for. I have yet to be able to run a side by side comparison like that, and forgot that some benchmarks store stock scores permanently. I imagine Smartbench is accurate ... do you happen to know if it provides its own floating point emulation to bypass the software engines that each processor uses and test only the hardware?

That is one of the problems with all of the Android benchmark programs. In this post, I mention other problems that many of them have. I don't know why they don't just read the real frequency through software and attach it to the results. Is that difficult to do? I imagine there should be an entry somewhere in /proc that has that information...

Thank you for the debate! I have enjoyed it thoroughly.

EDIT: That article you linked to on phone screen comparisons links to the exact same article I had linked to myself in another thread! It is quite a good read. However, according to the displaymate article that your links to, "the Samsung Galaxy S has lower brightness, excessive color saturation, higher power consumption"
[Epic 4G General] Electrofreak:
To be honest, I don't know the answer. But it is something to look into.

The author of the Smartbench 2010 application, Acei, joined the community just a few days ago to follow along on the Smartbench 2010 thread I started as well as a thread on strange results on a friend's Fascinate. He could probably answer those questions, if he's got time. I've got to say, it's awesome to see a developer insert himself into the community like he has, and he's really won over my support for his benchmark, because I can tell that if the issue arises where the accuracy of his benchmark is questioned, he will work hard to rectify the issue, something I've not seen from benchmarks like Quadrant.

Me too. Though, I've been chugging coffee to stay awake at work today because I was up too late last night. :D

The statement in my article was based upon the following quote:

Since the Super-AMOLED is approximately 20% more power efficient than the Nexus One's AMOLED (some Korean publication verified this at ~21%), and the Nexus One's AMOLED is (per this statement) more power efficient than the iPhone 3GS' LCD, it stands to reason that the Super-AMOLED is more power efficient than similar LCDs. I realize this line of reasoning is a stretch but that's all I had to work with.

The truth is, however, that the Super-AMOLED does eat more battery power than LCD at higher brightness levels and when browsing web-pages and the like. That said, it can also be significantly more efficient than LCD when displaying movies and the like. I read a good article on AMOLED vs LCD a while back that broke this down, but I haven't been able to find the link...
[Epic 4G General] thechicgeak:
While I agree that it is a reasonable assumption to make, if you look at the displaymate article that the blog you linked to also links to, it goes into much greater depth about the actually recorded watt usage of each screen. The link for that is here: http://www.displaymate.com/Smartphone_ShootOut_1.htm

The conclusion they reached is that overall, the Galaxy S SAMOLED is more power hungry, but does better on very dark scenes.
[Epic 4G General] fifedogg:
Food for thought... I just hit 24 hrs on my Shift and still have 42% battery left. I listened to howard stern for a few hours, made 5 or so calls etc. Did some web surfing, a few minutes of angry birds and checked some E-mails. That alone makes me happier I have my Shift as my daily phone and not my Epic which would have been charged 2x to get this kind of usage.
[Epic 4G General] Acei:
This is actually a very good idea! I'll add it to my wishlist - thanks for the suggestion! :)
[Epic 4G General] Electrofreak:
Yeah, that displaymate article was the one I was looking for at the end of a couple posts back. It is a great article... and it was literally sitting right under my nose, and you'd even told me as much. Talk about needing more sleep...
[Epic 4G General] thechicgeak:
Don't worry about it ;) . Forums can be addicting...

I just tried the Evo Shift at the Sprint store yesterday. I ran Smartbench on it, and it got 797 productivity and 1130 on the graphics portion. A full 200 less than the listed G2 for productivity :( . I am wondering if there is not some crippling software on there or something. Maybe it was just how it was configured for Sprint or what that particular one was running. It should have been faster than it was. Hardware-wise it is pretty much identical to the G2 right? My Epic got around 1000 on productivity (almost identical to the listed G2) and 1800 on graphics.

Subjectively, it felt slower than the G2 I have tried and my Epic. Aside from that, as far as I could tell the keyboard did not miss keys. That being said, I think I prefer the layout of the Epic keyboard. I especially like the back, search, home, and menu physical buttons on the Epic. Gawd, I hope they fix our k/b!

I couldn't get a good handle on build quality or weight since it was chained to a brick like all phones are at the Sprint store. The sliding mechanism felt good, very reminiscent of Droid phones. I hear people complaining about the friction, and I think that is just because those people are used to the springy Epic keyboard sliding mechanism. The amount of friction felt a little less than that of the Droids I have tried.

It does not have a dedicated camera button, and I think I would miss that part of my Epic. I didn't try out the camera, but the lens looks very beefy. It is about twice the physical size of ours. It does have an optical track pad. I think I would like that better about the Evo Shift.

Overall, I would say a solid phone. Better functioning keyboard with a worse layout. Should be fast enough if you take out all the Sprint crap.
[Epic 4G General] Acei:
The G2 result on the app comes from my own phone - I own one of those. Perhaps running a vanila Froyo is making a difference? I don't have any results for the Desire Z (identical hardware as G2 but with Sense UI) - that could be helpful.

I do get very consistent results for the G2 though.
[Epic 4G General] Electrofreak:
Did you check the version? Almost sounds like it's running Android 2.1 still.
[Epic 4G General] SilverJester:
Wow really good read! Thanks for the info guys :D
[Epic 4G General] jbadboy2007:
http://phandroid.com/2011/01/20/htc-evo-shift-4g-benchmarked-against-the-samsung-epic-4g/

LMAO if your this retarted to switch to this phone from an epic im at a loss of words for you. the evo shift takes a whole extra minute to finish the smartbench. Woooowwwww
[Epic 4G General] thechicgeak:
Great vid, but those prod scores seem low. Not sure why, but the prod scores for both phones were WAY lower than what I have experienced. I tested an Evo Shift in a Sprint store and got 800 prod, my personal Epic got 1000. Either this is evidence against the accuracy of Smartbench, or there is some other variable affecting the scores.

Honestly, every objective measure of CPU performance seems to be very very close between both phones. GPU obviously is way better on the Epic, I don't think anyone ever contested that, but if you don't play games, you won't ever be able to tell.

You aren't "retarted" ( note: spelled retarded ;) ) if you switch. You just prefer reliability and up-to-date software over better GPU performance and more features.
[Epic 4G General] Quis89:
But I'm not casually playing with the phones. I carry them both simultaneously. I'm constantly using one or the other all day. I have been for the past week. The speed differences from my use isn't noticeable in the least. I don't agree that its a downgrade honestly unless we are talking paper specs.
[Epic 4G General] Heelfan71:
yeah, they are both good phones. Comes down to personal preference. I find it funny how people "jump ship" to an equal phone. If I am jumping ship it will be to a vastly superior phone, not a lateral jump. :cool:
[Epic 4G General] snowmanwithahat:
I agree. I don't think there's much point unless its a significant upgrade.

My Epic so far has been amazing through various DI18 and DK28 roms.

Right now I'm running midNIGHT EXT4 and a gingerbread theme and I couldn't be happier. Very fast and snappy phone with a great looking UI. It's on 2.2 and responsive, I can't ask for much more.

At this point the official 2.2 is nice to have but I've actually really learned to like DK28, it works well for the most part.
[Epic 4G General] Electrofreak:
Interestingly enough, the last time Wirefly did a review, they used Quadrant, and I posted in the comments begging them to use something more accurate, like SmartBench 2010. I guess I'm that guy they talk about in the video. :p

Good to see that they were listening though. :)