Results: CPU Performance
As mentioned, Google's Nexus 10 centers on Samsung's Exynos 5 Dual SoC, formerly referred to as the 5250. The chip couples two Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.7 GHz with ARM's Mali-T604 (the number four indicating quad-core) GPU. Samsung manufacturers the Exynos 5 Dual on its 32 nm high-k metal gate process, which it says results in 30%-lower power consumption than the Exynos 4 Dual manufactured using a 45 nm node. With that said, we're curious to see how it stacks up against Qualcomm's existing S4 Plus and Nvidia's upcoming Tegra 4 SoCs, both of which benefit from a 28 nm process.
We discussed the Cortex-A15 superficially on page two of Snapdragon S4 Pro: Krait And Adreno 320, Benchmarked. Briefly, though, the -A15 employs the ARMv7 instruction set, just like ARM's Cortex-A9 design. The company claims performance up to 40% better than its prior-generation design at a given clock rate, though. Technically, a cluster of four Cortex-A15 cores supports up to 4 MB of L2 cache. But Samsung only arms its Exynos 5 Dual with 1 MB.
Geekbench doesn't reflect real-world performance; however, it's an interesting synthetic that helps demonstrate the relative performance of dissimilar platforms. According to our results, the Exynos 5 Dual's two Cortex-A15 cores deliver 80%+ more performance than the dual-core Cortex-A9s in TI's OMAP 44xx SoCs, albeit operating 500 MHz faster.
The CPU-oriented subtest helps pin down the Exynos 5 Dual's advantage in floating-point-based math (enhanced by the -A15's ability to execute 128 bits at a time), though it trails Intel's Atom Z2760 in the integer component.
But where the SoC really shines is the memory score. Samsung supports LPDDR3, DDR3, and LPDDR2 memory, but we have to imagine the Nexus 10 is armed with 2 GB of 800 MT/s LPDDR3 on its twin 32-bit channels (up to 12.8 GB/s) to post such a commanding lead over the Atom Z2760, which offers up to 6.4 GB/s of throughput via two channels of LPDDR2-800.
