Re: 530 announced!!!! We wanted more!!!
Didn't Daniel Rubino do a real life benchmark between the 1020's S4 vs the 630's 400?
Yes, he did. Now if you can tell me what those
numbers he reported actually mean, you win the internet!
For example, what does Basemark OS II's system performance of 571 for the Lumia 630 mean? How much better is that than the 1020's 465? Does that mean the 630 will run apps 22% faster? ...you might think, but after actually using the two devices side-by-side, you'd say the opposite, so why the bigger number? Does it maybe not apply to all apps? What if one of Basemark OS II's numbers is lower and the other is higher, which of those is more important for judging app performance? How big does the difference need to be for it to be noticeable?
I'll help you out. None of those numbers tell you anything. At best it tells you how good each device can run the benchmarking app's individual tests. Nothing more. Unfortunately, unless you plan to use your device primarily to run that benchmarking app, that just isn't very interesting. Why is that so? Because as long as we don't have a solid understanding of what each of those tests do and how to interpret the numerical results, we have no way of knowing how close they come to mimicking what apps actually do during everyday use! As it is, that benchmarking app is just a toy that creates pretty bar diagrams. Looking at the results, I'd say they are actually more deceptive than helpful.
Just to drive the point home, note that I can easily write a benchmark "proving" the 630 is four times faster than the 1020, but I can also write a benchmark showing that the 630 is only half as fast as the 1020. Neither of those benchmarks means anything, unless I also tell you exactly what is being measured!
Here are examples of more useful benchmarks:
Motorola Moto G (uses the exact same SoC as in the
Lumia 630)
Motorole Droid RAZR HD (uses the exact same SoC as in the
Lumia 1020)
This isn't as pretty to look at, and some might find these more confusing, but they are infinitely more useful. Why? Because here it's well understood what is being tested. You can lookup the details for most of those tests on the internet and get a good idea of how they work. That allows us to make better predictions of how those results translate into perceivable differences during everyday use. You don't need a degree in computer science for these number to be useful though. To get a general idea of a smartphone CPU's performance, it's usually enough to just look at the single-core performance score, as that is much more important than the multi-core score. Looking at the above benchmarks, you'll see the Lumia 1020 (equivalent) has a single-core score of 518, while the Lumia 630 has a score of 338. That is a 47% difference in the Lumia 1020's favour. This is a much better representation of what to expect during daily use, despite Basemark OS II's system score suggesting the opposite.
I suspect that Basemark OS II's system score is some amalgamation of single- and multi-core scores, but that isn't very useful. It's actually counter productive, because with each additional CPU core beyond the second, it causes the test to less accurately reflect how real apps actually work (real apps never perfectly scale across cores, the way multi-core benchmarks do).
So much for WPC's 630 to 1020 benchmark comparison. Getting back to the Lumia 530...
All of this applies to the Lumia 530 too, which will perform identically to the Lumia 630, except in GPU benchmarks, where it will perform worse. Above we were of course comparing the 630/530 to the previous generations high-end dual-core CPUs, just like WPC did. That just isn't quite fair. Compared to the Lumia 520, the 530 is likely ever so slightly slower (in most situations), but probably not noticeably slower. In graphics intensive games it might be noticeably slower. I don't know. I haven't yet found good benchmarks for the Lumia 520, but I'd say any performance disadvantage isn't likely to be a big deal. There is likely one important exception however, which is IE. Internet bowers are good at making use of many cores, particularly when rendering complicated web pages. Here it is fair to expect the 530 to do better than the 520. I just can't say how much better, but I'd expect it to be noticeable. That would be an interesting test.
In summary, while the Lumia 530 is overall definitely the weakest contender in the entire Lumia line up to date (despite having four cores looking good on paper) the question remains whether being the weakest automatically makes it a bad phone. Personally, I don't think that is necessarily the case. It just needs to run well enough for the asking price.
...but MS ecosystem). Secondly, due to power management improvements, the SD200 is optimized to last longer on battery (which folks do appreciate).
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