Handsets

Does Huawei’s Ascend D Quad XL Have the Fastest Processor on the Market?

16

A ton of great new SoC developments have been introduced as of late. Qualcomm’s S4 is an exciting chipset yet to be publicly available in a product, NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 with its 4+1 quad-core chipset and 12 core GPU has been established and is set to make a big splash this year, and Apple claims their A5X inside the new iPad is way better than that (yet to be proven). But Huawei could have something even more powerful than all of those.

Sweden-based website Nordic Hardware uncovered a bit more information about the chipset inside the Huawei Ascend D Quad XL. It’s an in-house processor called the Huawei K3V2 and is a quad core processor which comes in either 1.2GHz or 1.5GHz (depending on configuration) and has a 16 core GPU, 4 more than what NVIDIA’s GeForce has inside Tegra 3. They figured they’d put the device to the test to see if it really was that much faster than all the rest.

One benchmark they used was from Powerboard.com and it tested megapixels per second in each device’s native resolution. The D Quad outscored Samsung’s Exynos, NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 and Qualcomm’s MSM8260 overclocked to 2GHz. The device houses an HD display so the results aren’t as skewered as it would on, say, a WVGA or qHD device. We’re not sure if screen size differences are a factor in determining results.

They moved on to the ever familiar Nenamark 2 benchmark. This benchmark tests OpenGL ES 2.0 framerate. The Ascend D Quad XL beat out everyone with a frame rate of 62.75. The next closest was Qualcomm’s S4 with Adreno 225, NVIDIA’s GeForce with ULP2 and all the other dual-core options you’d expect it to be. (The S4 is the only dual-core chipset that could hang with it.) Four of the five top results are devices with at least 720p displays, with the Tegra 3-powered ASUS Transformer Prime having a slightly higher resolution (which could skewer results, but not by much).

Benchmarks are never an end-all, be-all method of determining which chipsets are faster and better than one another. Some benchmarks may put more emphasis on certain features of a chipset than others, and some may just be bad benchmarks period.

Another thing to consider is that benchmarks aim to push devices to their limit to see how much they’re capable of, but users often won’t notice differences in the real world. Games are still being developed for older 1GHz single-core processors so you won’t see a huge difference from platform to platform unless games are optimized like they are for Tegra 3. Also, single-core processors utilize Android quite well, so OS speed gains are usually only marginal at best. What do you guys think? [Thanks Anton!]

Quentyn Kennemer
The "Google Phone" sounded too awesome to pass up, so I bought a G1. The rest is history. And yes, I know my name isn't Wilson.

CONTEST: Guess NVIDIA’s Four Core Teams, Win A Transformer Prime!

Previous article

Nexus tablet a ‘done deal,’ could launch without Tegra 3 priced at $149 [RUMOR]

Next article

You may also like

16 Comments

  1. Huawei is onto something…can’t wait to get my hands on one of their devices!

  2. It will be very interesting to see what battery life this K3V2 offers.
    Most important thing for battery life will be which 3G and 4G Modems they used for their SoC, since 3G and $G are the heaviest battery consumers on todays phones.
    This is unless you play with the phone for several hours straight away, but rather use it in a normal day use.

    1. After the screen they are they heaviest battery consumers.

  3. Send me one and I will test it out for you and tell ya what I think>  ;)

  4. I’m certain you meant to say “skew” not “skewer.” I dint think we’re impaling test results here, Quentyn.

    1. pull this post over the grammar police are here

      1. Squealer… comment under cover.

      2. this gave me a chuckle.

  5. That’s impressive.  If Huawei can show they have some good software support behind them, they may pull an HTC and rise form the ODM field to a power player in the big leagues.

    1. I find this report to be Incredible. I find it hard to accept that Huawei is taking a very conservative marketing approach with their processor. Unless they are doing this purposely to see how the phone sells around the world. TAKE NOTE developers of android! this is a phone to be reckoned with. The minute they announced their new phones i was automatically attracted to them becuz of their new processor. It screamed UNIQUE, the minute they announced it was developed at home and not with the usual processor developers.

  6. I will wait for a screen that is better than the iPad 3.

  7. As you can see here, the S4 beats the Tegra 3 in all aspects(single threaded operations, multi-threaded operations, graphics, etc.)

  8. I’m thinking I want a phone with a S4 in it!

    More proof the dual core S4 is faster than the Nvidia 4-plus-1.

    Huawei K3V2 seems awesome too!

    1. GPU is faster

  9. I want one! I will always have a special place in my heart for Huawei, because they were my introduction to Android. I had the first Ascend, which I miss even though I have moved on to something bigger and better.

  10. This is a GPU test not a CPU test, that just mean they have the best GPU 

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in Handsets