Qualcomm is going to introduce a new Snapdragon platform this year called S4. We’ve already seen a handful of devices announced that’ll take advantage of it, most notably the HTC One X for AT&T and the the HTC One S for the global market. According to some early benchmarks done on a development board, the S4 blows everything out of the water, including the quad core NVIDIA Tegra 3. That being said there is an area where Qualcomm needs to step up its game, and that’s graphics. The Adreno 220 that’s in the S4 that’ll ship in those HTC devices is fine for most things, but it’s not going to be competitive by the time we see Samsung’s Galaxy S III and the iPhone 5. That’s where the S4 Pro comes in. It was just announced at Mobile World Congress and it’s expected to land in devices during the second half of this year. The S4 Pro will feature the same Krait cores that we’ll soon know and love from the as yet to ship S4, but with a GPU known as the Adreno 320; Qualcomm says it’s 400% faster than previous generation GPUs.
The big question is will this S4 Pro end up in smartphones this year or is that more of a 2013 thing? We don’t know what sort of power draw the S4 has, but we’re assuming it’s going to be awesome because it’s built on a 28 nanometer process. Then again, because these are completely new cores we’re familiar with, it can go either way.
Yesterday we published a report saying that said 40% of mobile devices that aren’t Apple made have a Qualcomm chip inside. That’s why we’re so obsessed with this company. Expect to see more S4 smartphones this year than you can shake a stick at, and possibly a few tablets, but who in their right mind would buy an Android tablet?