Qualcomm has now started selling the first official quad-core development platform. The tablet has a quad-core Snapdragon S4 processor chip with a tweaked Adreno 320 GPU, and it has now benchmarked against competing products, and they are humiliated.
Qualcomm’s Krait architecture is still the most efficient on the market and Snapdragon S4 with only two cores have been holding its ground against quad-core models based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 architecture. When Qualcomm now shift gears and adds another two CPU cores to its Snapdragon S4 processor, also known as APQ8064, no one can keep up. Qualcomm’s development platform MDP is clocked at 1.5 GHz and with its four efficient CPU cores the platform whips Nvidia Tegra 3 and Samsung Exynos 4412 pretty bad in several tests.
The Android platform is still not optimized for quad-core processors, but in benchmarks like Sunspider Javascript we can see how Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon S4 Pro outperforms even Intel’s Medfield platform.
A perhaps even bigger upgrade for Qualcomm’s new platform is the GPU Adreno 320. The circuit maker has improved both functionality with support for OpenCL 1.2, OpenGL 3.0, DirectX 11 feature level 9_3 and added a new rendering mode. Performance is a lot better and will according to Qualcomm be 3-4 times higher than Adreno 225 GPU.
This looks like the first benchmarks that confirms that Snapdragon S4 Prime not only crushes Snapdragon S4 but also Tegra 3 and Exynos 4412 in GLBenchmark. Snapdragon S4 Pro may even give Apple A5X a match, even if the latter is still king of the hill in terms of raw GPU power with its PowerVR SGX 543MP4.
Snapdragon S4 Pro will arrive in two shapes, APQ8064 without modem, and MSM8960T with integrated 4G/LTE modem. If no competitor can squeeze out a Cortex-A15 based processor in the near future this will be the new performance king of the Android market.
