Snapdragon S4 Pro benchmarked, crushes older chipsets

The lucky geeks at Engadget got their hands on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro MDP (Mobile Developer Platform) and managed to run several benchmarks on it. The Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset in question is APQ8064 - with a quad-core Krait processor and Adreno 320 GPU. It should come as no surprise then that it managed to beat current chipsets quite easily.

Here are the benchmark results obtained:

	S4 Pro MDP (APQ8064)	Nexus 7 (Tegra 3)	Galaxy S III (Exynos 4412)	One X (Tegra 3)	Galaxy S III (AT&T, MSM8960)	One X (AT&T, MSM8960)
Quadrant	7,698	3,501	4,454	4,906	5,084	4,784
Vellamo	2,538	1,650	1,751	1,617	2,153	2,259
AnTuTu	13,826	8,995	11,960	11,030	6,713	6,956
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms)	1,227	1,785	1,460	1,773	1,926	1,453
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps)	132	63	99	63	54	56
CF-Bench	18,219	11,807	13,110	13,233	9,439	9,479
SunSpider: lower scores are better

Krait is a newer architecture than Cortex-A9 (which powers the likes of Tegra 3 and Exynos 4 Quad chipsets) and even dual-core Kraits usually come close to quad-core A9's in tests. The brand new Adreno GPU turned out quite powerful too - it's a new design compared to the 2xx series.

The processor offers double the performance of a dual-core Krait CPU according to CF-Bench (no surprise here) and a big improvement on the quad-core Cortex-A9 chipsets. The SunSpider results also improved even though JavaScript isn't exactly multicore-friendly.

GLBenchmark shows GPU performance has more than doubled since Adreno 225 and easily beats Tegra 3's GeForce GPU. The Mali-400MP in the Exynos chipset comes closer, but is still over 30fps behind.

Those are some very impressive results, but it will be a while before we see the beastly chipest inside a consumer product. S4 Pro chipsets will probably debut on tablets, seeing how every major smartphone maker has already unveiled its flagship phone (besides Apple, but they’ll use their own design anyway)