Not to be outdone by the Samsung Galaxy S II, thanks to the smarty-pants developers over at XDA the Xoom is now burning through benchmarks at 1.6 GHz. As games for Honeycomb continue to get more awesome, and with Google’s new Movies service, you’ll have plenty of content to throw all that speed at. This is all courtesy of the open source Tiamat kernel, which has recently been updated to version 1.4.2.

While the internet can lecture you all day about how benchmarks don’t necessarily equal real-world performance, you gotta admit that Quadrant square is beautiful. You see that puny little bar next to the Xoom one? That was the score to beat only a year ago, and we’re already talking about quad-core processors! We’re gonna need a new graph soon, or an exponential scale… but this engineering student digresses.

Another bonus snuck into this update for Tiamat, enabling USB Ethernet, which would allow you to use your phone as a USB-tethered internet in a box. While overshadowed by the mind-melting benchmarks people are getting this is a cool feature. The only issue being the need for a seperate microUSB to microUSB cable since the Xoom only comes with a a micro to standard cable.

If you are brave enough, or excited enough not to care, head on over and follow the instructions to get your Xoom zooming, and be sure to let us know how it is!

[via XDA]