The Swiss Army Knife of Tablets: Toshiba's Thrive
Performance Benchmarks
Next, we'll take a look at how the Toshiba Thrive compares to other tablets by running a few common benchmarks that are currently available in the Android Marketplace. The first two tests are general purpose computing type benchmarks.
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Linpack measures floating point compute power of the Android operating system and the processor driving it. Here, all of our Tegra 2 based competitors running Android 3.1 appear to be pretty much on par with each other. The only slight stand-out is ViewSonic's gTablet running Android 2.2. Beyond that, the Thrive sits middle of the pack.
SunSpider tests the tablet's Javascript performance, and since Javascript is widely used around the web, this test is loosely indicative of browser performance with each of the slates we tested. Here the Thrive once again falls right in line with other Tegra 2-based tablets in its class, and even Apple's iPad 2.
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An3DBench is a benchmarking tool based on an Android port of the jPCT 3D engine. The app runs 7 tests in total that look at graphics processor fill rate with complex rendering workloads and scenes. We also were able to run some tests with An3DBenchXL, which is a newer version of the app that is significantly more demanding.
Once again, in both versions of this 3D graphics benchmark, the Toshiba Thrive puts out scores that are on par with competitive Honeycomb-based solutions like Motorola's Xoom, Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Acer's Iconia Tab. Interestingly, the Thrive edges out all other tablets in the Flower Power and Magic Island test but couldn't quite catch the Asus Transformer in the Emperor's New Clothes test. Regardless, performance variations are relatively small between all tablets here, except for perhaps the Acer Iconia Tab.
