Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II review: Brightest star

Exynos 4210 performance: Buckle up

The Exynos 4210 chipset is where the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II gets its speed. With a couple of Cortex-A9 cores, clocked at the unseen before 1.2 GHz, a brand new Mali-400MP GPU and a healthy gig of RAM, this phone is nothing short of a serial speeder. That’s why we decided to run a few more benchmarks than usual.

Our first objective was to measure the improvement the new dual-core architecture CPU brings over the 1GHz single-core Cortex-A8 CPU ticking inside the original Galaxy S. Given that both devices are now running Gingerbread we can count on the fact that all benchmark differences are almost entirely down to the chipset.

It is all there for everyone to see. In terms of pure computing power the Galaxy S II is not just better than its predecessor – it sweeps the floor with it.

We then wanted to see how the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S compares to the other dual-core CPU-packing chipset on the smartphone market, Tegra 2.

A couple of things to bear in mind here – the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S maximum frame-rate is capped at 60fps so benchmarks that aren’t challenging enough would normally fail to go beyond that. That’s why the Galaxy S II will score lower than its theoretical possibilities in some benchmarks, like Quadrant for example.

Lets’ not forget either that the I9100 Galaxy S II runs Gingerbread, while the Tegra 2 representative, the Optimus 2X is still stuck on Froyo, which accounts for some of the difference (though Gingerbread really doesn’t bring all that much in terms of performance improvements).

As you can see it's mostly one way traffic here. The only exception is the gaming score at SmartBenchmark 2011, where the Galaxy S II not only lost to the Optimus 2X, but also to its predecessor.Yet, given how easily the Samsung new flagship wins elsewhere we suspect this is due to some imperfection of the benchmark app itself.

So with Tegra 2 already a pretty powerful chipset, the Exynos 4210 is nothing short of a beast. We found it capable of playing 1080p (yep, that’s FullHD) Flash videos straight into the browser. More about that later, let’s now proceed with the software specifics, safe in the knowledge that the Galaxy S II can give you all the power you may possibly need.