Motorola Droid RAZR Review - A Better Clad Bionic
by Brian Klug on December 16, 2011 2:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Droid
- LTE
- 4G
- Motorola
- Android
- Mobile
- Droid RAZR
- motorola droid RAZR
Performance
The RAZR is the first time we’ve seen TI’s OMAP 4430 SoC with a 1.2 GHz CPU clock, other devices run OMAP 4430 at 1.0 GHz. As a refresher, OMAP4430 consists of two ARM Cortex A9 CPUs with the optional NEON SIMD unit for each core, alongside a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU and the usual accoutrements like the Cortex M3 image subsystem and TI’s encoder/decoder. We’ve gone over the details inside the Bionic piece and Droid 3 before, and I’d encourage you to check those out if you’re curious.
On the browser performance side, the RAZR is no slouch at all. In fact, I wager that part of Blur 6.x included some browser optimizations that dramatically improve scrolling behavior over the Bionic or other Motorola devices. It isn't quite buttery smooth like Android 4.0's stock browser or Samsung's, but it's much improved over the stock experience. This shows in the Vellamo total score more than anything.
Again, one look at those performance differences between the Bionic and RAZR and it's immediately obvious that something more than a simple 20% boost in CPU clock is at play here. Since I've been working on the Galaxy Nexus at the tail end of the RAZR review, I also tossed those numbers in here, and you can get a feeling for the JavaScript performance delta between Android 2.3.x and Android 4.0.1 right now. In the flash department (CraftyMindFlash) we're basically against Vsync in the test we use and will be using another test with more challenging assets soon.
In the synthetics, we see first that Linpack behaves as expected and reflects a 20% boost in CPU clocks over the Bionic. It's in the GPU department that things get a bit interesting, and I again included Galaxy Nexus results that we have on hand from that forthcoming review. The two perform very closely because, from what I can tell, the Galaxy Nexus' OMAP4460 SGX 540 clock is set at 307 MHz (even though OMAP4460 can clock its 540 at up to 384 MHz), very close to the RAZR's OMAP4430 which sets its SGX 540 clock at a maximum of 304 MHz. We'll investigate this further soon in the Galaxy Nexus review as well, but for now know that the RAZR and Galaxy Nexus are pretty evenly matched in the benchmarks.
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Devo2007 - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
Brian Klug - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
Motorola a few times made specific note that their skin isn't called Blur, even though in build.prop and relevant places, it's called "Blur." I guess it all just boils down to semantics. :)-Brian
yas69 - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
S2 benchmark values are different with November/December stock firmware.I get 1130 on vellamo with recent S2 firmware. Sunspide/Browsermark values are better than also higher than Razr.
Brian Klug - Saturday, December 17, 2011 - link
What ROM and browser are you tesing in? I can't get any higher than what's in the article on our UK SGS2 with the latest ROM from Kies.-Brian
yas69 - Sunday, December 18, 2011 - link
I9100XWKK2 / I9100XWKL1 both perform better than previous versions.yas69 - Monday, December 19, 2011 - link
sorry.I9100XWKK2 (2.3.6)
Vellamo = 1161
sunspider = 1980
browsermark = 78014
lemmo - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
Thanks for the review, but do you have any more info on audio quality in terms of music playback? You are saying that it is an improvement over the Bionic but how does it compare to other phones like SGS2 and iPhone?Your detailed review of audio quality on the SGS2 was really helpful and I thought you were going to include this testing methodology on all smartphone reviews from now on...?
kishorshack - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
Even i expect the same thing brian klug it would be awesome if you update this review someday :)Brian Klug - Saturday, December 17, 2011 - link
We're definitely going to do some more in-depth audio testing, it's something new to me but we've finally got the hardware and methodology, just have to interpret results. I did link to the RMAA runs from here for your own perusal, which we're going to talk a bit more about in the Galaxy Nexus piece.-Brian
lemmo - Saturday, December 17, 2011 - link
Thanks Brian that's great news :)As I asked in my comment below, will you do a comparative audio test with other phones when you do the Nexus review? The test results for just the phone you're testing don't mean much unless we know how they compare. Cheers