When I have a new Linux device in my hands, I love running NBench to see the raw CPU power. So I ported the NBench to Android, and you can find it in the Android Market.

The benchmark was designed to expose the capabilities of a system's CPU, FPU, memory system, and C compiler performance. The results can be published and seen on this web site: https://www.math.utah.edu/~mayer/linux/bmark.html

Now that we have a benchmark that runs on smartphones and PCs, we can make some interesting comparisons, and soon, a few results on Android phones were reported.

You'll see on the graph below, that newer devices based on the new ARM Cortex A8 architecture (Droid and Nexus one), are getting really powerful. The Nexus One OC to 1.11GHz can be compared to a Pentium III at 1GHz. The floating point performance is still low, but I don't think that Android takes into account the newer FP SIMD available on the Snapdragon or the TI OMAP.