AnandTech benchmarks Mali-400 as the fastest smartphone GPU

It was only last week Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun was boasting about Tegra 2's domination of Android devices.

When it comes to performance, however, it seems that ARM's first high end CPU-GPU win - Samsung's Galaxy S II - beats out the smartphone competition.

At least, that's the conclusion of an OpenGL 2.1 shader benchmark carried out by AnandTech.

It shows that compared to other hardware including iPhone 4, Nexus S and Galaxy Tab 10.1 (all of which use an ARM CPU and a PowerVR GPU), the Galaxy S II is 1.7 to 4 times faster.

The only thing that beats it is iPad 2, although iPhone 5 - when it launches - will likely be superior.

Perhaps that's not a huge surprise though as the Galaxy S II's GPU is a quad-core Mali 400 part (it was the first hardware to use this), which is combined with a dual-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 CPU into a design Samsung labels Exynos 4210.

ARM's argument is that combining its CPU and GPU technology gives excellent performance and battery life; a philosophy rival Qualcomm also follows in its Snapdragon architecture.

Nvidia, however, uses ARM CPUs mated its own GPU design. Still, as AnandTech doesn't seems to have benchmarked any Nvidia hardware in its test, we'll have to see how the forthcoming Tegra 3 tablets due in late 2011 shape up.

[source: AnandTech]