Four by four: Quad-core Android smartphones royal rumble

Welcome to the age of the quad-core Android behemoths! As it happens, there are currently just four of them in existence and we have all of them in our office ready to flex some multi-core muscle.

The smartphones in question, as most of you probably know, are the Samsung Galaxy S III, HTC One X, Meizu MX 4-core and the LG Optimus 4X HD. They all have some serious processing power from Samsung and Nvidia at their hearts, using the Exynos 4 quad and Tegra 3 chipsets. But which one is the best? That’s what we are going to find out soon, but until the complete shootout is ready we thought we might give you a teaser and give you an idea of what to expect.

What you are looking at is the Android elite. The Samsung Galaxy S III and the Meizu MX 4-core are powered by the same Exynos 4212 Quad chipset with four Cortex A9 cores clocked at 1.4GHz. On the other side we have the LG Optimus 4X HD and the HTC One X – both running Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chipset which rocks another four cores of the same type, but operating at 1.5GHz.

So, the game is set. The only rule is that there are no rules. This is not about battery life, weight or size. Whoever packs most grunt inside it is the winner.

We are going to test the four quad beasts in different benchmarks categories. Their CPU, GPU and the RAM will be put to various tests. Then, we’ll compare the results. Here’s a flavor of what you can expect when we publish our full review next week.

BenchmarkPi and Linpack are CPU-stressing tests. They’ll give us of how the quadruplet of cores inside each of the contestants is faring.

Linpack

Higher is better

• Meizu MX 4-core
  189.1
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  177.1
• LG Optimus 4X
  141.5
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  126.1

BenchmarkPi

Lower is better

• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  338
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  344
• LG Optimus 4X
  350
• Meizu MX 4-core
  362

NenaMark 2 and gives the GPU of the phones a pretty good workout. The results of those test will show how a device handles games and where is its limit.

NenaMark 2

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  58.8
• Meizu MX 4-core
  54.1
• LG Optimus 4X
  52.3
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  47.5

BrowserMark and SunSpider test HTML and JavaScript performance of the web browser. The higher a phone ranks here, the the better browsing experience you’ll get from it.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1447
• Meizu MX 4-core
  1458
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  1757
• LG Optimus 4X
  1845

BrowserMark

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  169, 811
• Meizu MX 4-core
  136, 806
• LG Optimus 4X
  134, 036
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  96, 803

So that’s that for now, but there’s plenty more to come. We’ll be making the elite company here jump through all kinds of hoops and we’ll be back with the results soon, so stay tuned.