Although the device has a 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor inside, it seems underpowered. Overall system performance isn’t as snappy as, say, an NVIDIA Tegra 2 Honeycomb tablet or even Samsung’s Hummingbird processor clocked at 1.2GHz. I, of course, wanted to see if this would be reflected in benchmarks so I took it through the gauntlet and here’s what I found, starting with AnTuTu.
AnTutu – I really have no knowledge on this benchmark, but I can tell you that it took the Flyer a hell of a long time to complete. It scored 2739 when all was said and done, with most of that obviously coming from high amount of RAM (1GB) and the increased clock speed on the CPU. 2D and 3D graphics performance scores weren’t terrible, but were nothing special. The only device not overclocked that I could put it up against was the Motorola XOOM, which apparently scored a 5752 at stock 1GHz speeds. The XOOM dominated CPU performance, staying in the 1400-1900 range down the board.
Linpack – Linpack scores were impressive, but no less was expected from a Snapdragon chipset clocked at 1.5GHz. It scored an average of 56 MFLOPS, though this isn’t as impressive as it once was when Linpack first became the premier benchmark for testing CPU efficiency. Competing (single-core) overclocked to similar speeds actually produce better scores.
Neocore – Although this device doesn’t have Qualcomm’s absolute latest GPU inside, the Adreno 205 was enough to muster up exactly 50 frames per second. Neocore now seems outdated, however, with low resolution and polygon counts being a cakewalk for most GPUs. Note: The Neocore benchmark was made by Adreno Graphics, a brand of Qualcomm’s.
Nenamark 2 – Nenamark is a lot more taxing and it shows in its benchmark results. At the end of it all, 10.9 frames per second was all the Flyer could average and that low framerate was visibly noticeable throughout the benchmark.
Quadrant – 1899-2100 is what I kept scoring with Quadrant, and compared to some stock phones with supposedly weaker chipsets, this isn’t too great of a score.
Smartbench 2011 – The Flyer scored a 1495 in productivity and a 2332 for games. They’re modest scores up against competition but more powerful devices easily has it beat.
I don’t claim to know a lot about CPUs, GPUs, file system performance and the inner-workings of these benchmarks, but I just wanted to provide a bit of commentary with my findings. What drove me to try all of these in the first place was the fact that overall OS performance on the Flyer isn’t that great, a point I’ll be touching on in our official review. In the meantime, feel free to take these scores and measure the Flyer up against your own device, phone, tablet or otherwise.
