Looks like a new HTC phone is in the pipeline for T-Mobile and it is something that is twice as powerful as the most powerful smartphones that are currently in the market. This little tidbit was found by someone who was going through the GLBenchmark site and suddenly stumbled upon a benchmark that came from an hitherto unknown HTC phone. And to our delight, the benchmark score was more than double of what was scored by the HTC EVO 4G — currently using the ARM-based 1GHz SnapDragon processor from Qualcomm.
This discovery was made by a writer at a tech site called AlienBabel tech and it has caused quite a stir. Speculations are rife that this is indeed that fabled Project Emerald from T-Mobile that has been doing its rounds in the circuit. The path of reasoning being that the Project Emerald phone was supposed to be from HTC and some snooping around done by the website reveals that the user who has uploaded this benchmark might be working with T-Mobile. More than that, the other phones benchmarked by this person have mostly belonged to T-Mobile or phones distributed by T-Mobile.
The user name on the site was mbibik and the reporter found out that there is in fact a Mike Bibik working for T-Mobile as a Senior Interaction Designer. This may be a coincidence but the facts point towards the direction of the two being the same person. A person who in possession of a test-sample HTC phone and has run benchmarks on it.
This entry has been removed from the GLBenchmark database, so we have only the screenshots presented in the original report but the whole thing seems genuine enough. It also ties in with Qualcomm’s statement that they have started sampling the latest generation Snapdragon chips with manufacturers. And all the high-end HTC phones use the Snapdragon processor.
The latest SnapDragon is based on dual-core architecture and it has the capabilities of going up to clock speeds of 1.2 – 1.5GHz. The extra core would explain the explosive benchmark scores. In fact, the Evo 4G scored a 512 frames on its CPU test, whilst this mysterious Glacier scored a hefty 1432, almost tripling the score set by the Evo. In this light, it can be safely assumed that there’s no other way that this kind of performance boost was achieved.
If this phone is anywhere near completion, it is a sure shot way for HTC to get much ahead of its current competition. Especially ahead of Apple in at least the area of CPU power. With this much power, smartphones and tablets are going to come a lot closer to being able to do things that no one really expects them to do well. Like multimedia-editing and higher amounts of multi-tasking.
ARM had introduced their dual-core design back in last year but so far this is the only report of it being used on a real product. However, that does not mean other chipmakers like VIA, Samsung and Apple themselves are not working on this new design that is about to increase the power of handheld devices by more than two times that what is now.
In the meantime, it seems like Intel will still be struggling this year to match up to ARM’s power efficiency at that level. They have been trying to enter the handheld market for quite some time now but their Atom line of x86 processors are nowhere near being power efficient enough to be fit for prolonged unplugged use. What will be interesting will be watching how Apple reacts to this when they update their iPhone next year.
