First independent ARM A15 Benchmark - Exynos 5250
Some exciting news, the first real-world benchmark has appeared for an ARM A15 chip, in this case the Samsung Exynos 5250, which has been launched in the latest Chromebook.
The benchmark is Sunspider, which is not multi-threaded, i.e. does utilise multiple cores, so you can evaluate the actual performance (javascript) of a single-core., now we can see the performance improvement ARM has baked into their latest hardware
Courtesy of Gigacom, Sunspider on the ARM version of Google Chrome that comes installed on the Chromebook = 660ms (Lower is better). Compared to the current King of the Hill ARM A9 device the Galaxy Note 2 (Exynos 4412), which is clocked at 1.6 GHz, it achieves 972 ms accorded to GSM Arena, other sites have similar figures.
LOWER IS BETTER
Exynos 5250 - A15 @ 1.7 Ghz = 660 ms
Exynos 4412 - A9 @ 1.6 Ghz =972 ms
The 5250 is clocked 6% higher than the 4412, so if we adjust the results for CPU frequency parity
Exynos 5250 = 660 ms
Exynos 4412 @ 1.7 Ghz = 914 ms
This is not an exhaustive performance test!, but we can see that in this one popular benchmark that ARM A15 is ~30% faster than the A9 architecture when adjusted for clock speed.
To sweeten the deal further A15 SoC will run at a higher clock than A9s, Tegra 4 (T40) is stated to run @ 1.8 GHz with a bump to 2 GHz after a couple of quarters, just like Tegra 3. Samsung has the even mightier 5450, a quad-core variant of the chip in this test, rumored to run @ 2 GHz, combined with much more powerful GPU, and Android's software optimisations 2013 is going to be one hell of year for tech fans
