Inside the Fire HDX 8.9 is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 quad-core processor running at 2.5GHz, Adreno 420 graphics clocked at 600MHz, and 2GB of RAM. It's a potent combination that should yield some respectable benchmark results, but does it? Let's have a look.
 |
| CPU testing |
| iOS and Android CPU testing |
|
The Fire HDX 8.9 falls just a couple spots out of a top 10 finish in our Sunspider benchmark comparison. It also trailed the Fire HD 7, though not by much. Amazon's Silk browser is a unique beast in that it uses a split architecture that divides processing between local hardware and the cloud (Amazon Web Services, or AWS). That can play a role in web-based benchmarking scores. Regardless, that's a decent score, as the Fire HDX 8.9 manages to sit below the 800ms mark, unlike the majority of mobile devices in this comparison.
After stretching its legs in Sunspider, the Fire HDX 8.9 zooms a few rings up the ladder in Browsermark by taking sixth place. It's knocking on the door of NVIDIA's Shield Tablet, a slate that's built for gaming, and finds itself in good company.
Turning our attention to Geekbench, Amazon's flagship tablet again ascends the benchmarking ladder to take hold of the No. 3 spot. A few hundred points separate the Fire HDX 8.9 and SHIELD Tablet in multi-core performance, while things are much tighter in the single-core portion.
