Qualcomm S4 chipset benchmarks promise amazing performance

A fresh batch of benchmarks of Qualcomm's S4 platform show just how powerful the new Krait cores are. The tests were run on a reference platform, but since we don't care about the rest of the hardware (screen, camera, etc.), just the chipset performance, these result are a good indication of what to expect.

Qualcomm S4 uses Krait cores, two running at 1.5GHz in the case of the MSM8960 that was used in the reference platform. Krait is better in almost every respect than the old Scorpion cores and as a result performance has skyrocketed in both single and multi threaded tests.

Linpack reports a whopping 106.8 MFLOPS in single-threaded mode and 218.2 MFLOPS in multithreaded mode. For comparison, a Tegra 3 chipset with four Cortex-A9 cores at 1.3GHz score 135.9 MFLOPS in the multi-threaded benchmark.

Linpack benchmark results for Qualcomm S4 MSM8960 and Tegra 3 (single and multithreaded)

SunSpider and BrowserMark results top even the highly optimized Samsung Galaxy Nexus, though not by as much as we would have expected.

The GPU inside the Qualcomm MSM8960 is an Adreno 225, even though S4 chipsets are supposed to use Adreno 3xx GPUs. Still, on paper the 225 matches the PowerVR SGX543MP2, a.k.a. the GPU found inside the iPhone 4S.

GLBenchmark however tells a different story - when run in offscreen mode (so that it can be forced to render graphics at 720p resolution, regardless of the actual screen res), the Adreno 225 beats the Mali-400MP4 inside the Galaxy S II (but not by much) and falls quite short of the SGX543MP2. It lags behind the Tegra 3's GPU too.

GLBenchmark results for Qualcomm S4 MSM8960 and Tegra 3 (Egypt and Pro)

Hit the source link to check out more benchmark results and an in-depth analysis of the MSM8960-based reference platform over at AnandTech.