If you've been following our SoC and smartphone related coverage over the past couple of years, you'll probably remember how Qualcomm let us take home an MDP8660 from MWC 2011 and thoroughly benchmark it. Qualcomm has done essentially the same thing this year, this time sending their latest and greatest MSM8960 SoC inside the aptly named MSM8960 Mobile Development Platform (MDP) just before MWC 2012.

The timing is impeccable as we're fully expecting to start seeing MSM8960 based phones next week at MWC, and we've been telling you to hold off on any smartphone purchases until the 8960's arrival. Today we're finally able to give you an indication of just how fast Qualcomm's next-generation Snapdragon S4 will be. Read on!

Yesterday evening I met up with HTC, who let me take a quick look at a number of upcoming unreleased phones, including the HTC Sensation 4G and HTC EVO 3D. Naturally, the first thing I did was sit down and run some benchmarks during our limited time with the phones, and get an overall feel for the two. These two phones are both based on Qualcomm's MSM8x60 SoC which consists of two 1.2 GHz scorpion cores, and Adreno 220 graphics. We also spent a little bit of time with the HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa.

Read on for some benchmark goodness and our thoughts about these four devices. 

At both CES and MWC, Qualcomm teased us with their dual core Snapdragon SoC, the MSM8x60. First we saw it from afar, then they let us run tests on it, finally they let us take one with us to benchmark thoroughly. We've got the first Adreno 220 GPU benchmarks from the MSM8660 in a Qualcomm Mobile Development Platform already taken care of and are ready to share.

Read on for all the results!