As the newest Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, also known under the pet name Krait, hit the market, the curious tech fanatics managed to get it under the microscopes and in the benchmarks so we get a better understanding of the new technology behind it. We had the chance to speak about it with the guys at Qualcomm.
“Architecturally Krait isn’t a design of tradeoffs, rather it’s a significant step forward along almost all vectors. Each core can fetch, decode and execute more instructions in parallel than its predecessor (Scorpion, Snapdragon S1/S2/S3),” explained these days Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi.
We were today at the Qualcomm booth, managed to discuss with officials and they have assured us that Qualcomm is going to up its game so as to be able to resist in the fierce battle of tablet processors, especially with such big names as Intel entering the market. Krait has significant advantages over other ARM Cortex A9 based design (NVIDIA Tegra 2/3, TI OMAP 4, Apple A5). In a nutshell, Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 performs incredibly fast regardless of applications or usage model. When it comes to the Linpack tests Qualcomm’s novelty beats all competition.
A Qualcomm official told us:
“The performance advantage here is insane. The MSM8960 is able to deliver more than twice the performance of any currently shipping SoC. The gains are likely due in no small part to improvements in Krait’s cache/memory controller. Krait can also issue multi-issue FP instructions, A9 class architectures can apparenty only dual-issue integer instructions.”
Sascha Segan from PCMag also takes his turn in analyzing Qualcomm’s fast S4 MSM8960 chip and predicts it will be “the heart of high end smartphones to come.” After such an enticing description, we find out what motivated it. The new processor from Qualcomm 4 series is expected to enable high definition gaming and media and to boost Android web browsing as well. Intriguingly, the new Qualcomm processor stands ahead competition, despite its dual core feature.
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