Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon S4 Pro: Krait with Adreno 320
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 27, 2012 5:37 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Krait
- Mobile
- Tablets
- SoCs
Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon S4 Pro, a version of the MSM8960 with an Adreno 320 GPU instead of the Adreno 225 that is found in the initial shipping MSM8960, among other unannounced changes. As we found in our first performance look at the MSM8960, the GPU performance is better than previous architectures but not the leap forward we're expecting for this next generation. The Adreno 3xx family should change that.
The Snapdragon S4 Pro should start sampling in 2012, and we may see devices with it in 2012 as well.
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piroroadkill - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
Most interesting chipset of the moment. Tegra 3 looks like a bloated beast in comparison.tipoo - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
To be fair, Krait will ship nearly a year after Tegra 3 started to. Other SoC makers could say in a year they'll be that far ahead of Krait too. But I am excited for Krait phones, that's quite an improvement.I think some of T3s problems must come from its memory controller, they have four active cores and a GPU on a single channel controller while most dual cores are on dual channel.
Exodite - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
What?We've yet to see any Tegra 3 phones on the market and phones with Krait-based SoCs, though not the 'Pro' version obviously, stand poised to ship at roughly the same time.
We might not see Cortex A15-based designs like OMAP 5 for some time yet but Krait seems ready enough if you follow the news.
Certainly, it won't ship a year after Tegra 3 as that would imply Q2 2013.
tipoo - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
Whoops, I meant all devices, not just phones. Yeah, Krait will crush T3 in phones.Lucian Armasu - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 - link
No, but still, by then Nvidia will probably launch the Tegra 3+, which should also be on 28nm.I'd agree that CPU-wise, the Krait is a better choice today, GPU-wise I still think Tegra beats it.
But while we're arguing over which one is or will be more powerful between these 2, I think Exynos 5250 based on Cortex A15 will beat both of them in CPU and GPU performance.
mutil0r - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
Which is why Samsung and Qualcomm have announced 'bloated' Quad-core SoC's? *facepalm*Arnulf - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
If quad core Krait scales up proportionally it will hardly be bloated. Dual core version trashes Tegra3 so quad Krait should be even better.This actually looks like the first real challenger that could brawl with Brazos/Atom for dominance of the netbook segment.
danjw - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
Umm, the only benchmarks out there for the Krait come from Qualcom. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that they are accurate until we have a third party confirmation.leozno1 - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
Umm you must not have seen the benchmarks that Anandtech put up last week?metafor - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
I blame nVidia's "design-for-marketing". There is zero to no reason to waste die area for a phone device with quadcore. That area could've been better used either to make the chip cheaper, use towards lower-power cores (which nVidia did get right) or more GPU pipelines.Now, on a tablet or a Windows 8 laptop running ARM, quad-core may make more sense and hopefully, these manufacturers will stick with putting quad-cores in those and having dual-core variants for smartphones.