Performance comparison of current PDAs

Question

Are there any up-to-date performance comparisons of current PDAs available online? Or comparisons of the different available CPUs? I want to buy the right PDA for developing CPU-intensive C# graphics apps (in my spare time).

So far I've found:

• Futuremark's handheld benchmarks don't aggregate results online
• SpbBenchmark only has results online for obsolete PDAs
• VsBenchmark has an up-to-date overview, but I don't want to base my purchase on a single source of information

EDIT: I bought a HTC Touch Diamond (P3700). It has a Qualcomm MSM7201A 528MHz CPU which is closely related to the iPhone CPU. It's fast enough, but I'm afraid (my limited knowledge of) C# is the bottleneck for my CPU-intensive graphics apps.

Answer 1

Forget about the CPU, what you want is as much RAM as possible for graphics apps on the PDA. Because the CPU's don't have much in the way of caches like Desktop apps do. Everybody has pretty much standardized on the Intel CPU and most run the same CPU just at different clock speeds. You can usually adjust the clock speed with an application to install.

Look for RAM and the most RAM you can find. Also since you are doing graphics you probably want to find a VGA display not a QVGA. HTC makes a really nice PDA/Phone.

Also you might want to consider picking up a cheap Zune, they are amazing devices, with enough CPU and RAM to handle most anything you want to do. And Microsoft just released the SDK for the Zune with .NET.

Answer 2

Not all PDAs run Intel - there are plenty on ARM - e.g. iPhone, Treo. The iPhone, Palm, Treo. The iPod is underpinned by the VideoCore processor, which makes for great graphics performance though there is no direct access, so you would need to write your application use the standard APIs. Qualcomm have 3D acceleration on some of the ARM-core MSM platforms.

Answer 3

I am unsure about it either but there are more things to consider to like this:

http://www.nseries.com/products/n810/#l=products,n810

which runs linux, and you can get mono for it:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Mono

And a whole slew of many great linux apps.

Thats my play toy :)

Answer 4

On the "right" platform, your app probably isn't going to be CPU intensive, but intensive on the display controller. If it's using the CPU a lot then it's probably emulating or using software for a lot of the graphics primitives and it's going to be slow.

You need something with good hardware acceleration. If it's a spare time project, you might look at XNA and targeting a Zune.