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From what I understand there's the Snapdragon, Hummingbird, OMAP, ARM and now(or soon) Tegra2? Did I miss any? (I apologize if I'm mixing terms here, confusing a technology name with a model name)

What are the comparative strengths/weaknesses of these processors? Which one is the best or which one does what best? Also, if one is only available in phones or only available in tablets, please specify.

Matt
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  • You cannot assume they are all 1GHz. Some processors run at 1GHz and have a 5 stage pipeline with wait states. Another might run at 800MHz and have a 5 stage pipeline with operand forwarding, removing wait states, giving it an advantage in certain cases, not in others. If they both had 1GHz then the comparison would be that the one without wait states is always better. – Kortuk Nov 28 '10 at 06:09
  • Ok, well that goes to show what I don't know. I removed that part of the question so let the answers flow... – Matt Nov 28 '10 at 06:53
  • The Tegra2 is dual core: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-2.html – Bryan Denny Nov 29 '10 at 01:53

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From my answer on the When will dual core android phones start to become available? question, there's a good comparison of the HummingBird vs SnapDragon processor systems here. Hummingbird is a system made by Qualcomm and used in phones like the Nexus One and HTC Desire, the Snapdragon is made by Samsung and used in devices like the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab. OMAP is another system chip brand, this one by Texas Instruments and used in phones like the Motorola Droid and the Palm Pre.

All of three of those are "System on a Chip" systems, where the CPU, some memory, and some other processors like the Graphics Procesing Unit, digital signal processors or wireless signal processing unit are all built into the same chip. Building all of this into a single chip instead of having all the individual capabilities spread out across separate chips gives a lot of savings in power usage, size and space used inside a phone.

The CPU inside all of them uses the ARM processor architecture, which is a standard set of instructions and abilities that the CPU follows. As do the iPhone's processors, the iPhone 4's processor is also made by Samsung and is very similar to the SnapDragon processors used in Galaxy S's. Other processor architectures that you may have heard of are the Intel x86 processor architecture, or the AMD64, one of which is probably powering the machine you're reading this at.

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GAThrawn
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