ARCHOS 50 Platinum smartphone vs Samsung Galaxy III (checking Qualcomm 8225Q vs Exynos 4412 performance)

ARCHOS has recently introduced, their first line of Android Smartphones with 3 different models from 3.5″ to 5.3″. According to the press release:

“The flagship device, the ARCHOS 50 Platinum, features a stunning 5.0 inch full black IPS display paired with a quad-core CPU at 1.2GHz and an 8MP camera. Enduser will have an experience similar to a Samsung Galaxy S3 for half the price.”

Actually, we would not take this assumption for granted, as we think the Samsung Galaxy SIII and ARCHOS 50 Platinum smartphones can hardly be compared, their hardware is really different, from the CPU to the screen (Samsung model has about 2x more pixels) both offer different performance and features which probably result in a really different user experience, at a different price.

Here is a quick table pointing out the differences on both smartphone specifications:

ARCHOS 50 Platinum specs		Samsung Galaxy SIII specs
	VS
CPU: Qualcomm 8225Q (Snapdragon S4 Play) (quad-core ARM Cortex-A5 at 1,2 GHz) GPU: Adreno 203 RAM: 1 GB Display: IPS 5″ 960×540 pixels (qHD), 220 DPI Storage: 4 GB 3G max Speed: HSDPA 7,2 Mbits/s – HSUPA 5,76 Mbit/s Retail price: 199,99€ / ~ $260		CPU: Samsung Exynos 4412 (ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core at 1,4 GHz) GPU: ARM Mali-400MP4 at 400Mhz RAM: 1 GB / 2 GB (i9300 model / i9305 Lte model) Display: 4,8″ Super AMOLED HD 1280 x 720 pixels, 306 DPI Storage: 16, 32 or 64 GB 3G max Speed: HSPA+ 21 Mbps (GT-I9300) Current price GT-I9300 (unlocked) : €385 / $450

On paper, there is a significant speed difference for processors based on ARM Cortex-A5 and ARM Cortex-A9 architecture. Wikipedia indicates 1.57 DMIPS / MHz (per core) on the A5, while 2.50 DMIPS/MHz/core are announced on the the ARM Cortex-A9. Other factors have great influence on the performance/battery life such the as the semiconductor technology: the Qualcomm 8225Q is built using 45nm technlogy while the Exynos 4412 uses 32 nm HKMG manufacturing process. Quoting Samsung from their blog:

In fact, 32nm HKMG processors are 30% faster and use 30% less power than processors developed on the 45nm process, making them ideal for high-performance mobile applications.

Finally the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) choice is important as well and we can observe again some important differences between the 2 processors, especially in the pixel fill rates:

ARCHOS 50 Platinum vs Samsung Galaxy S3

Qualcomm 8225Q (aka Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Play) vs Exynos 4412 benchmark

There aren’t many benchmarks measures currently available for the quad-core Qualcomm 8225Q processor

On the other hand, the Samsung Galaxy SIII obtains a score of 16301 on AnTuTu Benchmark 3.x

While these numbers give a general idea of the phones performance, we surely can’t rely too much on the figures as we don’t have much details on the test conditions and which firmware (default of modified) each device had during the benchmarks.

Finally, the end-user experience mentioned in this article introduction could be understood as a combination of different factors: hardware specifications, O/S features and optimization. We’ll wait to have both devices in hands to judge the result and attest about our experience, stay tuned !

Links of interest:
Snapdragon SoC information page at Qualcomm, ARM_Cortex-A5 on WIKIPedia
MSM 8225 (dual core version) specs
Samsung Exynos SoC info at wikipedia.org, MALI 400MP info page at arm.com