Android 4.1 Jelly Bean preview: First look

Synthetic benchmarks

We ran some benchmarks on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It's important to point out that we're using the same version that was used at the Google I/O demo and that's powering the Nexus phones they handed out to attendees, but even so it's not a finalized build (but it's very close).

The first thing we noticed is that CPU performance seems to have degraded a bit - both in BenchmarkPi and in Linpack, which test single- and multi-threaded performance respectively.

None of the changes in Jelly Bean sound like they should negatively impact CPU performance, so this could be the result of some debugging-related processes eating up precious system resources.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  279
• HTC One S
  306
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  338
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  344
• Huawei Ascend P1
  351
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (ICS)
  408
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (JB)
  447
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  452
• Sony Xperia S
  536
• Sony Xperia P
  539
• HTC Sensation XE
  583

Linpack

Higher is better

• HTC One S
  210
• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  196
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  177.1
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  126.1
• Huawei Ascend P1
  97.0
• Sony Xperia S
  86.4
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  77.6
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (ICS)
  77.1
• Sony Xperia P
  66.9
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (JB)
  63.7
• HTC Sensation XE
  50.4

NenaMark 2 is an important test - we weren't quite sure which way it will go, but as turned out it went up. The Galaxy Nexus saw a nearly 20% increase in framerate after the update.

Project Butter brings a number of improvements to Android aimed at making the user interface smoother and more responsive. It seems that 3D gaming performance has gone up too.

NenaMark 2

Higher is better

• HTC One S
  60.5
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  58.8
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  51.6
• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  49.1
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  47.5
• Sony Xperia S
  37.5
• Huawei Ascend P1
  36.7
• Sony Xperia P
  29.9
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (JB)
  28.7
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (ICS)
  24
• HTC Sensation XE
  23

Google updated the browser for Jelly Bean. Note that we're talking about the standard Android browser and not Chrome, which is going to be the default browser on the upcoming Nexus 7 tablet.

The updated JavaScript engine shaved off a few milliseconds from the SunSpider test. The Galaxy Nexus is now faster than a Krait-packing HTC One S, a Tegra 3-based HTC One X and even the new Apple iPad.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1447
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (JB)
  1626
• HTC One S
  1708
• New Apple iPad
  1722
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  1757
• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  1834
• Huawei Ascend P1
  1840
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  1849
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (ICS)
  1863
• Apple iPhone 4S (iOS 5.1)
  2217
• Sony Xperia S
  2587
• Sony Xperia P
  2784
• HTC Sensation XE
  4404

The BrowerMark score went up a notch too, but the difference isn't all that great here. It's likely just the improvement in the JavaScript portions of the benchmark.

BrowserMark

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  169811
• Huawei Ascend P1
  127532
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (JB)
  115613
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  111853
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus (ICS)
  103591
• New Apple iPad
  103264
• HTC One S
  98435
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  96803
• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  92232
• Apple iPhone 4S
  88725
• Sony Xperia S
  74990
• HTC Sensation XE
  72498
• Sony Xperia P
  72237

When the finalized version of Jelly Bean comes out, we'll re-run the tests and hopefully the CPU performance should bounce back. The improved 3D and web browsing performance is quite welcome though and it means that browsing the web on Android will become an even cooler experience.