Snapdragon S4 Pro: Krait And Adreno 320, Benchmarked
Table of contents
- 1. Qualcomm's Fourth-Generation Snapdragon Family Gets A Flagship
- 2. Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Line-Up: Krait CPUs And Adreno Graphics
- 3. Performance From Scorpion To Krait: What A Difference One Generation Makes
According to Qualcomm, its S4 Pro will be the next big thing in mobile performance, powering a new generation of smartphones and tablets. We put the company's claim to the test. The result? We think the competition, especially Nvidia, should be worried.
Since the beginning of computing, true enthusiasts have wanted to know more about the underlying hardware in their machines. From the old Tandy 1000 with Intel's 8088 processor to modern tablets with ARM-based architectures, components under the hood matter, even if we only use them to enjoy the device itself.
Back in the '80s, standardization made it possible to start swapping parts in and out of an IBM-compatible PC. Although most subsystems were soldered in, we still remember adding serial mouse cards, modems, and "high-end" 20 MB hard drives.
Over time, we were delighted to get access to upgradeable processors (even on-board L2 cache modules), standardized memory formats, faster graphics interfaces, and a broad range of peripherals. It was truly a golden age for power users who knew exactly what they wanted to to spend and where to spend it for the best experience.
What's The Future of Mobile Gaming?
Check out our interview with Four Android And iOS Game Developers for an insider's look of how the software world will evolve, and why hardware plays such an important role.
That model lives on today in enthusiast desktops. However, as we push forward into an era of mobility, compact tablet and smartphone form factors prevent the flexibility typical of a gaming machine at home. When you buy a mobile device, your choices narrow to the capacity of non-volatile memory available for storing music, movies, and pictures.
We've moved backwards in a sense. In the interest of being portable, we're willing to give up the ability to play games at the same quality we're used to. And the smaller you go, the worse performance gets. Because these diminutive platforms are all highly integrated, there's not a darned thing an enthusiast can typically do to make his or her hardware run faster.
Here's the thing, though. Developers aren't just writing software for iOS or Android anymore. They're actually optimizing and targeting specific platforms now. Nvidia has, perhaps, seen the most success engaging with the software community and getting games enabled on its Tegra 3 SoC that simply won't run as well on other Android-based gadgets. That means you have to do your homework now more than ever.
Despite the truly amazing things we've seen ISVs do for Tegra 3, Nvidia's share of the smartphone market was comparatively small in 2011 (it ranked sixth, according to Strategy Analytics). The top player was Qualcomm with its family of Snapdragon SoCs. Naturally, any move the company makes is going to have a profound impact on the mobile market moving forward.
Qualcomm recently invited us to a benchmark workshop where we were offered an opportunity to go hands-on with its S4 Pro, available in two- and four-core configurations.
Shortly thereafter, we acquired an S4 Pro Mobile Development Platform of our own, allowing us to perform controlled comparisons against other tablets in our lab based on competing architectures. This one's data-heavy, so buckle up!
Related Stories :
- Inforce Develops a Pico-ITX System with Snapdragon S4 Pro
- LG Intros Optimus G: The First Snapdragon S4 Pro Device
- Qualcomm Expands Snapdragon S4 Line with More Quad-Core
- Qualcomm Intros Two Quad-Core Snapdragon S4 Play SoCs
- Qualcomm Preps Snapdragon S4 For Windows RT
- Report: Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 in Short Supply
- Qualcomm Launches Eight Snapdragon S4 Chips
- Qualcomm Details Next Gen Snapdragon S4 CPU
- Hands-on: LG Optimus G and the Quad-core S4 Pro Chip
- Qualcomm's S4 Pro (Adreno 320): Big GPU Performance
Apple: Use this for the next iPad and all will be forgiven.
Naw, more like give foxconn workers better salary, do something good with mountain of money they have, stop patent trolling, stop silly war with google/samsung and stop lieing. Then maybe Apple will be forgiven.
Naw, more like give foxconn workers better salary, do something good with mountain of money they have, stop patent trolling, stop silly war with google/samsung and stop lieing. Then maybe Apple will be forgiven.
Well, it'd be a start. I wouldn't go nearly as far as all is forgiven.
No comparison with Samsung exynos4 ?
AFAIUI, the PowerVR GPU in ipad3 is more of a brute force architecture. "Just throw more transistors" is its mantra. So its good in current workloads.
The Adreno320 is more refined and optimised arch. Trying to get the most performance from least silicon area. It is still being refined. Hence, it will do well in future applications.
This just makes the tegra 3 look bad.
Why the ST-ericsson 8500 isn't in this list either? too few phone out? Xperia S/P... looks it would rock some of concurrents.. omap..S3...
Please be as exaustive as possible
Error in the chart on second page.
The cortex A15 DMIPS/MHz should read above the A9. Around 3.5 DMIPS/MHz from the rumblings.
These krait numbers aren't very impressive if you normalize for clockspeeds.
In fact, they seem to suggest only a very small improvement over A9, if any at all.
Very nice review Andrew!
Why placing only the weakest version of Tegra 3 and not Tegra 3 T33 (ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity 700)??? Or both of them.
Tegra 3 is complete overhyped trash. abysmal memory bandwidth and weak GPU performance with useless extra cores.
Why isn't the exynos quad in the comparison?
This is a pretty good article, but I have one problem with it: the Tegra 3 is probably not the best example for the Cortex-A9. It's hobbled with very low memory bandwidth. It could probably perform better (including the GPU) with a better memory interface. Nvidia made a major design mistake with that.
Nice article.
You might want to fix (bold) the 'Aggregate Performance Per Core' chart; note the Plus & Pro numbers.
AFAIUI, the PowerVR GPU in ipad3 is more of a brute force architecture. "Just throw more transistors" is its mantra. So its good in current workloads. The Adreno320 is more refined and optimised arch. Trying to get the most performance from least silicon area. It is still being refined. Hence, it will do well in future applications.
No. PowerVR holds some very specific advantages over there competition... Such as shader-driven tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR) architecture.... and their GPUs are actually MORE efficient than their competition. Not less.
It's still very impressive what Qualcomm's done... I'm just not thinking they'll dethrone PowerVR anytime soon as the mobile graphics performance leader.
It's interesting that the S4 needs 1.5 Ghz to beat the Tegra. And that's a high end Snapdragon vs bottom of the line Tegra. I'd bet that at the same clock rate with a level playing field these two would trade blows. This tells me that the Snapdragon is still way behind Tegra. S4 isn't in any production hardware and Nvidia is going to release the next Tegra chips in a few months.
When Tegra and Snapdragon devices are available at the same time I'd bet that Tegra will handily beat Snapdragon. I wouldn't say Qualcomm is back in the fight, I would say this is Qualcomm's last desperate attempt to stay relevent
Good Review. I'm curious as to how accurate your "aggregate" single core performance numbers are to a real single threaded benchmark. I'm not an expert, but I thought the memory controller and GPU were separate from the CPU Cores. Can you simply divide those benchmark numbers by 4 to get single core memory and multimedia performance?
this soc shall be at the heart of my next phone.
Google, please allow the next nexus to be powerful, and have expandable memory.
Enough imitating apples cloud dreams, we want local storage!!!!
64GB microsd card is $48 on pace to be $36 by next year.
this is so much great tosee Toms's hardaware doing mobile gpu benchmarks