Without conducting some tests on a smartphone, it’s hard to tell whether an upgrade is overdue or just a waste of money. The most important component to benchmark is the CPU, which is most easily done on Android phones—the free application Quadrant generates a graph comparing processor speed with that of other popular phones.
To check the browser’s performance, use the SunSpider or V8 JavaScript test tools, which work across any phone platform. The Speedtest.net Mobile application is an easy-to-use tool for testing download speeds (which can vary from phone to phone on the same network) on both Android and iOS .
Battery life can also indicate if it’s time to trade up. To show how quickly the phone’s battery is draining over time, try Battery Graph , another Android app. Differences in network signal and software make comparing battery life between phones difficult, though. The best method of doing that, if you can get your hands on the phone you’re considering upgrading to, is to play the same video on both and measure how long it takes for the battery to die.
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Without conducting some tests on a smartphone, it's hard to tell whether an upgrade is overdue or just a waste of money. The most important component to benchmark is the CPU, which is most easily done on Android phones—the free application Quadrant
All of our testing was performed on a Lenovo X1 laptop with a 13-inch screen. This machine has a second generation i5-2520 CPU running at 2.5Ghz, 4GB of RAM. It's running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional. As so configured, this is a fairly

All of this updated hardware is great but it needs something else: updated software. The AR.Drone's basic control app, AR.Free Flight has most certainly been improved and expanded over the past couple of years, however, it's time for a leap forward.
For testing the stability of the P0 state on my Brazos chip I ran Prime95's “blend” stress test which puts a heavy load on both the CPU cores and the memory controller. I watched both the CPU-Z readouts and BrazosTweaker's P-State read out while I was
Parallel processing was once a specialized niche of software development, but with the rise of multicore CPUs and distributed computing, parallelism is going mainstream. Unfortunately, today's programming languages aren't keeping pace with the trend.
What does make the LLVMpipe driver more fascinating with Mesa 8.0 is that it can now work with the GNOME 3.x Shell and Mutter. With ease you can now run the GNOME Shell using a software driver without GPU acceleration while not eating up all of your CPU. I've already tried it out and it's working. Red Hat is looking for this to play a role in Fedora 17 and to eventually deprecate the GNOME 3.x fall-back mode. This work allows the GNOME Shell to be used then within a QEMU/KVM instance where GPU hardware acceleration is not currently available, among other environments. To see if the LLVMpipe OpenGL performance has changed between Mesa 7.11 and Mesa 8.0, I ran some tests yesterday and today. Using the Mesa Git code I compared the latest state of the Mesa 8.0 branch to that of the Mesa 7.11 branch (Mesa 7.11.2 + a few other patches living in the tree; Mesa 7.11.0 wasn't used since it didn't have LLVM 3.0 support). Version 3.0 of LLVM was used for both the 7.11 and 8.0 testing. With the OpenArena game, the performance of LLVMpipe between Mesa 7.11 and 8.0 has not changed at all. Only at 640 x 480 was the frame-rate above 30 FPS, but even at a resolution of 1600 x 900 there was no OpenGL frame-rate difference when using the Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver on the two releases -- even when using a higher-end Intel CPU. With LLVMpipe beginning to play a more important role in Fedora, Red Hat is working on some performance optimizations to LLVMpipe / software rendering. Just earlier this week there was the announcement of the Virtual GEM Provivder (VGEM). Expect the performance improvements to land in the next few months, plus LLVMpipe approaching OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 compliance, so in a few months I'll be back with more benchmarks.