Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 (Krait) Performance Preview - 1.5 GHz MSM8960 MDP and Adreno 225 Benchmarks
by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on February 21, 2012 3:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Adreno
- Krait
- Mobile
Final Words
It goes without saying that MSM8960 is a hugely important SoC release for Qualcomm. It's the first release with Qualcomm's new Krait CPU architecture, an entirely new cellular baseband with support for nearly every air interface, and is manufactured on TSMC's 28nm process. It says something that we're able to hold 28nm TSMC silicon in our hands in the form of the MDP, and it's only a matter of time before we start seeing Krait show up in devices in 2012.
We've gone over basically all of the benchmarks available to us on Android right now, and yet subjective performance impressions are still valuable. The MDP8960 is the absolute fastest we've seen Ice Cream Sandwich thus far - the UI is absolutely butter smooth everywhere, and web browsing in either Chrome or the stock Android Browser is also the smoothest we've seen it. There's no stutter bringing up the application switcher, or taking screenshots, two places that 4.0.3 still drops frames on the Galaxy Nexus.
Krait offers another generational leap in mobile SoC performance. The range of impact depends entirely on the workload but it's safe to say that it's noticeable. The GPU side of the equation has been improved tremendously as well, although that's mostly a function of 28nm enabling a very high clock speed for Qualcomm's Adreno 225. We are eager to see what the Adreno 3xx GPUs that will pair up with future Krait SoCs can do.
The big unknowns today are power consumption and the performance of shipping devices. While we were able to provide power numbers using Qualcomm's handy Trepn tool, we couldn't produce a reference point on older silicon. The move to 28nm and a second generation of cellular basebands has generally been heralded as being the answer to our battery life issues, particularly with LTE. It remains to be seen just how much of an improvement we'll see there. Knowing how much power MSM8960's cellular architecture uses is especially relevant when you consider that MDM9615 includes the exact same modem as MSM8960.
These initial results look extremely promising, however. Krait based devices should begin shipping sometime next quarter, the wait is almost over.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
86 Comments
View All Comments
bhspencer - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
Does anyone know if Linpak is using the hardware or software floating point calculations for the MFLOPS number.metafor - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
Hardware. But it's run on the JIT instead of native code. According to CF-Bench, Java FP performance is around 1/3 of native. Neither actually use NEON but instead uses the older VFP instructions.vision33r - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
The Tegra 3 is actually a big disappointment from a performance standpoint. It actually has 5 CPU cores and the GPU performance isn't much better than the Tegra 2. The Adreno 225 is a much bigger upgrade but I'm afraid that it's another marginal upgrade.The A5 in the iPad2/iPhone 4S are over 1 year old by March. In that time, Nvidia's Tegra 2/3 has not dominated and the MSM8960 is finally a true contender for the fastest SOC on the market. By the time this thing is out in volume, Apple has the A6 ready and most likely another 4-8x performance increase over the A5.
This SOC will probably be forgotten when the A6 is out.
LetsGo - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
Yeah your right looking at my Asus Transformer Prime running GTA 3. /SA lot of graphical optimisations can be done on the CPU cores before data is offloaded to the GPU.
The moral of the story is that Benchmarks are only a rough guide at best.
tipoo - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
Unless the rumors are true and its A5X, not A6, with just faster dual cores rather than quads on a newer architecture. I would not be surprised, its like the 3G-3GS was an architecture change, then the 4 was just a faster chip on a similar architecture. The iPad 2 was an architecture change, the 3 might just be a faster version of the same thing, hopefully with improvements in the GPU. I'd be fine with that, as long as the GPU kept up with the new resolution.Stormkroe - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
I was just plotting out what little resolution scaling info there is here and noticed something very odd. Both the iphone 4s and galaxy s2 actually score MUCH higher when the resolution is raised to 720p offscreen. I can see that in the 4s' case it could be explained with fps caps, but the S2 is definitely not hitting a cap at 34.6 fps @ 800x480, yet it hits 42.5 fps @ 1280x720. All other phones predictably step down in speed. Anyone else notice this?Alexstarfire - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
Yes I did. It was actually the reason I was going to post. I was curious to know if the iPhone had VSync or not because it made no sense that it would get better performance at a higher resolution. Neither of the results make any sense to me since they are counter-intuitive.If the "offscreen" tests force VSync off then that could explain it for the iPhone but not really for the SGSII unless some parts of the test go way past the 60FPS cap with VSync turned on.
alter.eg00 - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
Shut up & take my moneyDenithor - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
Seconded!!I'm still carrying a first generation HTC Incredible (yep, one of the original ones!), been out of contract for a few months, was waiting to hear more about the 28nm SoC update. These look really, really good, seriously looking forward to them hitting the market now!
tipoo - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
I wonder how many apps scale beyond two cores. For the time being, I doubt its many, and since you're still not doing any true multitasking I think a faster dual core like this will trump a slower quad like the Tegra 3 most of the time.