Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

Benchmarking Mobile devices

Posted by Jon Peddie on July 28th 2011 | Discuss
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Tags: mobile benchmark qualcomm appstore

New Web Browser test shows value of GPU clock

How do you benchmark a mobile device? You download an app and run it. Qualcomm has a nice one, more on that later.

But how do you benchmark a mobile device with a benchmark that isn’t in a sanctioned app store. If you had a little more control over the device you could email to your mobile device, but getting it to install from the email would be tricky. Maybe we need an app for getting apps.

So if you want to test a lot of mobile devices there are some obstacles in your way. But you can use WIFI to get to the web even if you don’t have an account for a device you’re testing.

In mid-June this year Qualcomm released Vellamo, a Web browser benchmark. You do know that Qualcomm acquired AMD’s ATI group that made mobile phone graphics, right? And you probably remember that just before they got acquired, ATI acquired Bitboys in Finland. And there are a couple of other Finns in the graphics group at Qualcomm. Therefore it should not come as surprise that in Finnish mythology Vellamo is the goddess of the sea. She’s sometimes described as “cold hearted” but often pictured as a mermaid.

Vellamo is a benchmark that evaluates mobile Web browser performance on Android devices. It provides a holistic view into browser performance and stability, including networking, Java­Script, rendering, and user experience. Qualcomm says it incorporates industry standards and custom tests, and suggests we can use it to learn about the mobile device we’re carrying and/or would like to carry.

We have a few mobile phones here and an Android tablet and decided we’d give the mermaid a twirl. Luckily, the Vellamo app is available in the Android Market so it’s easy to install.

As the data suggests, GPU clock speed seems to count the most in Web browser performance. However, there are other uncontrollable variable such as the network.The test results presentation is quite good, and very straight forward. In fact it’s one of the better data-graphics we’ve seen in terms of all it says in such limited space and limited colors.

The top score is for the LG Galaxy Tab tablet and is the big winner in this batch of tests.

What do we think?

It’s important to keep in mind this is just a test of Web browser performance and not overall processor or phone performance. We are going to run similar tests on these (and other) mobile devices using Rightware’s benchmark as well.