This article is outdated. We have already published a full review.
The Sony Xperia Z uses a Snapdragon APQ8064 S4 Pro chipset, which is the fastest to currently power an Android phone. It packs four Krait CPU cores clocked at 1.5GHz, 2GB of RAM and Adreno 320 GPU. That same chipset ticks inside the Oppo Find 5, Google Nexus 4, the LG Optimus G and the HTC DROID DNA / Butterfly.
The Krait cores are fast, no doubt about that - two of them were coming only slightly short of a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU and four make up a real beast. And the Xperia Z doesn't disappoint. It comes up on top in Benchmark Pi (which is all about single-threaded performance) and it's also on the top in Linpack (which focuses on multithreading).
Lower is better
Higher is better
The clean sweep continued with consecutive victories in the three compound benchmarks AnTuTu, Quadrant and GeekBench 2.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
We ran GLBenchmark off-screen, which means we're testing at a fixed resolution, which lets us test the raw GPU power. The Xperia Z didn't disappoint, scoring as high as the Oppo Find 5 and the Nexus 4, and a tad better than the iPhone 5.
Higher is better
But most games will probably want to run at native resolution, so we're including Epic Citadel, which uses Unreal Engine 3. Unreal Engine is popular with mobile game makers, so it's a pretty important test. The benchmark was run at the High Quality setting and yet the Xperia Z once again topped posting an amazing result and was pushing against the 60fps limitation of the screen for almost the entire test.
Higher is better
We were almost stating to suspect that the Xperia Z is an unbeatable benchmark champion, but the browser trials broke its streak. Of course that's more down to the Chrome browser than the actual computing prowess of the smartphone, but the SunSpider score of 1906ms was rather uninspiring. The Nexus 4 doesn't do too well here either - unlike its desktop counterpart, Chrome for Android just isn't very good at this test.
In BrowserMark 2 things started to look up again - the Xperia Z took the second place there - outrun only by the LG Optimus G, which has the same chipset but lowerscreen resolution (so, each time the phone redraws a web page, there's less than half the number of pixels to deal with). The Xperia Z also took the second place in the HTML5-test Vellamo, beaten only by the Galaxy Note II.
Lower is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
To sum things up, Sony has managed to extract more performance from the four Krait cores than any manufacturer to use this chipset. The Adreno 320 GPU does equally well - it manages playable framerates using a real-world 3D engine at FullHD resolution. It's hardly a surprise then, that the overall user experience with this one is smooth as butter.
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