New Qualcomm CPU's Real World Performance is Insane

From DailyTech: Qualcomm, Inc. (QCOM) impressed at the 2012 Consumer Electronic Show in January. At the show it talked about its transition down to the 28 nm node (via Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Comp., Ltd.'s (TPE:2330) new processes) and pushing Snapdragon 4 (S4) system-on-a-chip designs onto the market.

Developers' first taste of S4 will be delivered via the MSM8960 Mobile Development Platform (MDP), which will be distributed at the 2012 Mobile World Congress, which starts Feb. 27 in Barcelona, Spain. But AnandTech scored an early unit and has been busy benchmarking it.

How does the fourth generation Snapdragon fare? To quote AnandTech:

The [CPU] performance advantage... is insane.

The super-chip's performance comes, in part, thanks to the new Krait core, which is built on a licensed ARMv7 instruction set from ARM Holdings plc. (LON:ARM). The new core is similar, in some ways, to the ARM Cortex-A15 intellectual property core from ARM Holdings.

The configuration tested by AnandTech was the MSM 8960 MDP, a dual-core 1.5 GHz design. Quad-core and single-core variants will also be available. The cores onboard pack twice the L2 cache (1 MB) of their predecessor, a deeper 11-stage pipeline a 50% wider instruction decoder (3-wide), and twice the execution ports (7). The cores support out-of-order execution and 128-bit NEON instructions.

In certain math-heavy (e.g. Linpack) or cache-heavy benchmarks, the S4 more than doubles the scores of its closest competitors -- the Motorola Droid RAZR (1.2 GHz dual-core OMAP4430 from Texas Instruments, Inc. (TXN)) and the Galaxy S II (also OMAP4430), and the Galaxy Nexus (1.2 GHz dual-core OMAP4460). In browser benchmarks, the new S4 chip is 20-35 percent faster.

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