Performance Comparison of Amlogic S805 and S802 Processors

Amlogic S805 is a quad core Cortex A5 processor for entry levels Android media players, S802 is a quad core processor with faster Cortex A9 cores clocked @ 2.0 GHz, and S812 is an upcoming upgrade of S802 with HEVC/H.265 hardware video decoding, and Gigabit Ethernet support. I’ve already written about the features differences between AML8726-MX, S802, S805, and S812, but since I now have some devices I can make direct comparison between S802 and S805. It’s quite clear on paper than S802 should be significantly faster than S805, so the only question to answer is by how much, but I’ve been asked to do it, and it could be a fun exercise.  The hardware devices used for the comparison are two Android media players: EM6Q-MXQ for S805 and Probox2 EX for S802, and I used the results from three Android benchmarks: Antutu 5.1, Vellamo 3.x, and 3Dmark Ice Storm Extreme. Let’s go straight to the results.

Sources:

• EM6Q-EMX Review for all S805 benchmarks
• AndroidPC.es for Probox2 EX Vellamo and 3Dmark Ice Storm Extreme scores.
• Probox2 EX Antutu 5.1 screenshots [1] and [2]

Without much surprise Amlogic S802 is faster than Amlogic S805 for all tests, most of the time well over twice as fast. In Antutu, RAM speed and 2D graphics are “only” about 75% faster with S802. The 2D graphics perfromance may also have impacted the Browser test in Vellamo which is only 34% faster. At first glance, the 3D GPU scores may be confusing. How can an octa core Mali-450 GPU can be three times faster then a quad core Mali-450 GPU in benchmarks. I think the difference may comes from the number of fragment cores rather than the total of GPU cores. I understand Mali-450MP6 used in S802 is comprised of 2 vertex cores and 6 fragment cores, whereas the quad core Mali-450 found in S805 may just have 2 vertex cores, and 2 fragment cores, and the benchmark may be more sensitive to fragment cores, so 6 cores outperform 2 cores by 3 times. At least. that’s my theory.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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