U.S. Galaxy S III Might Not Have Quad-core CPU with LTE
Quad-core Exynos won't play nice with LTE.
The cell phone industry has been buzzing about Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S III for months and yesterday Sammy proudly confirmed what we already knew from the countless rumors: When the phone does become available, it will pack Samsung's powerful quad-core CPU, the Exynos 4 Quad. However, it seems not everyone buying a Galaxy S III will get an Exynos 4 Quad phone. Heck, if these rumors are true, they won't even get a quad-core phone.
AndroidCommunity reports that similar to the HTC One X, which got a dual-core Snapdragon for the U.S. but a quad-core Tegra 3 for International markets, the Galaxy S III may also see a spec change for the American market. The story goes that an unnamed Samsung exec spoke to the Korea Times and spilled the beans that though the European GSIII would have the Exynos, the U.S. model would be Qualcomm-powered instead because the quad-core chips aren't yet compatible with America's LTE networks.
Samsung hasn't officially commented on the report, but with the phone scheduled to launch on May 3, we don't have long to wait before we find out the truth. Rumored specs for the Galaxy S III include a 4.6-inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display, a quad-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera, a 1.3-megapixel camera for video calling, 16GB of storage, microSD, Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi, and support for microUSB.

it says " the U.S. model would be Qualcomm-powered instead because the quad-core chips aren't yet compatible with America's LTE networks."
NO PHONE needs quad core, the fact that its quad core is specifically added becuase the architecture allows it. this is a 32nm iir and is much less power expensive. Not to mention most of the time you can turn other cores off to make it less power hungry.
it says " the U.S. model would be Qualcomm-powered instead because the quad-core chips aren't yet compatible with America's LTE networks."
NO PHONE needs quad core, the fact that its quad core is specifically added becuase the architecture allows it. this is a 32nm iir and is much less power expensive. Not to mention most of the time you can turn other cores off to make it less power hungry.
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I disagree, from my experience with GB phones that had single and dual cores they were not smooth operating. ...often locking up and crashing. Now if you're saying ICS alone would resolve all of that, we'll have to see. I most recently had a Razr Maxx and it loved to freeze and need a reboot. It wasn't slow, but often choppy. Maybe a quad-core would've had no impact.
Now wait just a cotton-pick'n minute. I've been reading in these forums how superior Samsung phones are. Are you certain you have your account of things straight?
Do some research on xda forums...
I was being facetious. ...sorry it wasn't more obvious.
I will agree our network is behind. The other countries, ffrom what ive read have better networks than we do and CDMA is old...i know Verizon is looking to switch over to GSM or something else in the near future. Meh, thats capitolizm for you right? Bank off the lowest possible quality equipment then call the "current" service everyone has used for the past decade "new" and charge more. sigh.
The "lag" you see on these GB phones is the crap that the carriers add, the crap that motorola adds, HTC adds (SENSE) and it just bogs it down. The AOSP / CM7 / CM9 rom builds will make you think twice abou tneeding multiple cores.
I guess this wouldn't be the best time to note that iOS doesn't have this "lag" you mentioned. ...I'm just say'n.
hopefully this means that battery life will improve, and app developers will actually work towards more optimized apps that dont suck battery life.
Tell this to the British where car manufacturers have to provide special edition cars with the dashboard/steering wheel layout reversed to allow driving safely on the other side of the road.
Or tell the French to get rid of their SECAM system, or the Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc. to change their typewriter unfriendly writing style.
As technology evolves in separate markets you run into incompatibilities and switching a large market, i.e. Europe, Asia or the USA, to conform to a different standard is difficult and expensive.
Often you decide it is better to simply live with it.
It's not a perfect comparison since the difference is actually greater in A9 v A15, but you can think of S4 as a Sandy bridge i3 and the Exynos Quad as being a Athlon II x4. The Sandy Bridge architecture in the i3 has a much greater IPC than K10.5 in the Athlon II, so the i3 can do a similar amount with just 2 cores as the AthlonII with 4 cores.
If the performance of the Exynos Quad is any amount similar to the Tegra3, I'll bet it'll be maybe 10% faster thanks to it's dual channel memory, then the S4 will actually be the more attractive chip overall. Considering the Exynos Quad still uses the Mali-400 it's not like GPU performance will be better to even it out either.