Testing the Computational Capabilities of Mobile Device Processors: Some Interesting Benchmark Results

Application development for mobile devices has become big business. Between the increasing computational capabilities of these devices, their ubiquity, and the availability of dozens of development environments, new applications for these devices are being produced daily by large companies and independent software entrepreneurs. As a result, many researchers are interested in the computational strength and potential of mobile devices. While benchmark tests for desktop and laptop processors are readily available, there are very few benchmarks available for the processors used in mobile devices. Rather, the data for mobile device capabilities are primarily limited to the usability of the devices, tests regarding overall features, and battery capacity. However, one of the major challenges of the on-going trend of researchers migrating computationally intensive algorithms originally designed for desktops to mobile devices is the lack of fundamental understanding of the computational capabilities of the processors of mobile devices. In order to address this significant gap in the research and to provide programmers with a better understanding of the computational capabilities and limitations of these devices, this research devised and ran a series of benchmark tests on several popular mobile phones. This paper describes the nature of the benchmark tests developed, presents the results, and highlights some of the interesting limitations which were identified in the process.