Qualcomm's Fast S4 MSM8960 Chip: Hands On, Benchmarked

Four cores are not always better than two. I recently got some quality time with Qualcomm's new super-phone platform, the S4 MSM8960, and it proves that none of the lazy ways consumers and press use to describe processor speed are going to apply anymore.

This will be the heart of high-end smartphones to come, and I'm going to try to explain why it's important to the average smartphone buyer. If you're looking for a 9-page discourse on pipelines and data structures, turn to the hands-on over at AnandTech instead. They know more about chip architecture than I do.

The quick summary: the 8960 is really fast. It fits into phones. It enables smooth, high-def gaming and media, and it significantly boosts Android Web browsing speed. And it's coming soon to a phone or tablet near you; we're likely to see it first in phones released at Mobile World Congress next week such as the Asus Padfone.

The 8960 is the first of Qualcomm's Series 4 (S4) chips, which share a similar architecture but will vary in speed and mobile network support. I'll be referring to the 8960 and S4 interchangeably below, but I'll also explain how S4 will expand beyond the 8960.

How We Tested Qualcomm's New Chip
I got my MSM8960 in a Qualcomm Mobile Development Platform, which isn't a real phone. It's a brick that Qualcomm sells to phone manufacturers and software developers to show off its chip. A big, black rectangle, it has a 13-megapixel camera on the back and a 1024-by-600 screen. That's a weird resolution, and it makes it a little tough to compare performance directly against existing phones in the market.

The MDM runs Android 4.0.3 "Ice Cream Sandwich," but it doesn't have Android Market, and it doesn't even make phone calls. It runs apps just fine, though. I installed a bunch of APKs I had backed up from one of my other phones using the Android developer kit, and it was time to test. I put the MSM8960 through all of our standard benchmarks and then some:

AnTuTu is our standard system benchmark for Android phones. AnTuTu gives us an overall system performance number and sub-scores for RAM speed, CPU integer processing, CPU floating-point math, 2D graphics, 3D graphics, database access (like your contacts), and reading and writing to the SD card.

NenaMark 2 is a graphics benchmark that measures performance with OpenGL ES 2.0, a popular graphics API. An3DBenchXL is another 3D graphics benchmark.

Browsermark is an all-encompassing, Web-based browsing benchmark that focuses on the performance of Web apps.

SunSpider is a well-known JavaScript benchmark for Web browsing performance.

CaffeineMark and Linpack are both brute-force CPU math benchmarks.

We don't usually report exact benchmark numbers on phones, because I don't want people to draw inaccurate conclusions. There are so many layers to the smartphone experience (such as the skins manufacturers put on top of Android) that a 10 percent difference on one benchmark usually isn't noticeable in the day to day. But Qualcomm wanted us to check out the raw processor here - so here we are.

How Qualcomm's S4 Stacks Up
I compared the MSM8960 to a 1.2-Ghz, dual-core, TI OMAP4460-based (Verizon Wireless) running Android 4.0.1, and a 1.2-Ghz, quad-core, Nvidia Tegra 3-based running Android 4.0.3. That last device is the fastest Android-powered gadget I've tested so far. It's not fair to compare Android 2.3 devices to Android 4.0 gadgets, as browser performance really changes between the versions.

The new Qualcomm S4 chip blew out the competition on the two Web-browser-based benchmarks. On Browsermark, it scored 16 percent higher than the quad-core Tegra 3 and 32 percent higher than the dual-core TI OMAP. On Sunspider, it scored 19 percent better than the Tegra 3 and 30 percent better than the OMAP. Those are the most important benchmarks in my view, because they use a real-world application.

On CaffeineMark and Linpack, the two heavy-duty math benchmarks, the Qualcomm S4 was also faster. On CaffeineMark, it scored 19 percent higher than the Tegra 3 and 64 percent higher than the TI OMAP. On Linpack, it scored 66 percent higher than the Tegra 3 and more than one and a half times as high as the OMAP.

The 8960 uses Qualcomm's new Adreno 225 GPU. Graphics performance was solid, and surprisingly, better than the Nvidia chip's. The MSM8960 will ship in "Vsync On" mode, which basically means it tops out at 60 frames per second to keep the screen stable. The MDM ran right up against the 60-fps limit in Nenamark 2, which neither of the other competing chips could. (Admittedly, the Tegra 3 in the eee Pad is pushing a third more pixels on the tablet's larger screen.) It also got higher scores than the competition on An3DBenchXL.

Sounds awesome, huh? There's a catch. It's possible to program software to work better on one kind of chip than another. The MDM's scores on the overall Antutu benchmark were disappointing. Integer and floating-point results were much lower than the Tegra 3, although they were higher than the TI OMAP4. 2D and 3D scores were a wee bit better than competitors, although not by much.

Qualcomm says that's because Antutu's tests scale linearly with the number of cores - in other words, it's using multiple cores too well, from Qualcomm's perspective. That means a quad-core processor has a huge advantage over a dual-core processor, even a very fast one, on that specific test.

Continue Reading: What This Means For You>

What This Means For You
The S4 processor promises console-class gaming on Android phones and tablets, better Web browsing, and a generally smoother Android experience overall. I found that the super-fast processor definitely ironed out some of the bumps in the typical Android experience. For instance, the lag when drawing lines with a stylus in Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile was gone. Fruit Ninja felt uncommonly precise. 1080p HD video, whether you're recording it, playing it or showing it on a TV, should now be totally standard.

Of course, the competition isn't standing still. Nvidia's Tegra 3 will appear in a bunch of phones at Mobile World Congress. TI keeps threatening to , which is much more similar to the Qualcomm S4 than the existing OMAP4 is. Also at Mobile World Congress, we'll probably see a tablet based on the Samsung Exynos 5250, which could top all of these chips in power. Our sister publication ExtremeTech has a quick rundown of the similarities and differences between these various chips.

There are other battlefields, too. Nvidia has done a great job of getting game developers to write first-class games tuned to its chips' graphics abilities. TI has been doing a lot of work with gesture-based interfaces like the Kinect, and the company has a great reputation for photo and image processing. And Nvidia, TI, and Qualcomm will all provide chips for Windows 8 tablets.

The S4's big mystery is battery life. Qualcomm says this MDM isn't tuned for the best possible power management, so I didn't test battery life. Nvidia says that its five-core system is more power-efficient than Qualcomm's two cores, because Tegra 3 can turn its cores on and off at will, including using a super-low-power core when needed. Qualcomm, obviously, disagrees, saying its ability to alter the speed of its two cores offers even better power efficiency.

The MSM8960 is only the beginning of the S4 march. Qualcomm says the S4 chip line will include dual- and quad-core chips with speeds up to 2.5Ghz per core and the potential for an even faster GPU, the Adreno 305. It'll support cameras up to 20 megapixels, LTE 4G, HSPA+, and CDMA. Faster chips than the MSM8960 are already on the roadmap.

The Megahertz Myth and the Core Conundrum
So here's the problem. The Galaxy Nexus has a 1.2-Ghz, dual-core processor. The MSM8960 has a 1.5-Ghz, dual-core processor. The Tegra 3 has a 1.2-Ghz, quad-core processor.

The MSM8960's dual-core, 1.5-Ghz is much more than 30 percent faster than the Galaxy Nexus's processor, and it's sometimes faster than the Tegra 3, which has double the cores.

Why is that? In part, it's Krait. Smartphone processors are all compatible - they all speak the same language of ARM instruction sets - but they're allowed to come up with their words in very different ways. Qualcomm has taken the ARM instruction set and designed its own core, which is called Krait. It speaks ARM's language, but it's not an off-the-shelf ARM part.

Krait uses a tighter manufacturing process, at 28nm rather than Tegra 3's 40nm, which lets it lay down more circuits per square millimeter. And Krait's two cores are similar to ARM's A15, which is the next generation from Tegra 3's A9. TI's OMAP5 and Samsung's Exynos 5250 are also dual-core A15 layouts. For more details on the architectural differences between these chips, check out ExtremeTech and AnandTech.

All of this means that when you're shopping for the speediest smartphone, there's no single number on which to rely. Yeah, yeah, sure, obviously I'm going to say you have to read the reviews, but you have to read the reviews, or at least look at the benchmark results. Or just rest assured: next year's smartphones, it looks like, will be fast.