Introduction
Recently previewed by AnandTech, Qualcomm's next-gen mobile SoC, scheduled for use in devices later this year, has now been benchmarked. The MSM8960 is the first chip to be seen from the Snapdragon S4 series and will also be the firm's first 28nm offering.
Current-gen Snapdragon S3 chips, for example, the MSM8660 found in the HTC Evo 3D, are 45nm and feature customised dual-core 1.2 to 1.5 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processing cores, up to a single 333MHz LPDDR2 interface and an Adreno 220 graphics core.
The new MSM8960 is still targeted at phones and so remains dual-core, however is now clocked between 1.5 and 1.7 GHz, accepts dual-channel 500MHz LPDDR2 memory and features an improved Adreno 225 GPU. Not much is known about Qualcomm's CPU cores, as they tend to be heavily customised from standard ARM designs, however with a 3-way out-of-order pipeline, the CPU is going to be closer to the ARM Cortex A-15 than the A9. What's most impressive is that the SoC features an on-board LTE modem, the first of its kind.
