Dragon magic
The problem with announcing a new family of chips a year before they're likely to make an appearance in is how to keep the levels of interest up in the intervening time.
Qualcomm dominates the smartphone SoC market, but is much less prominent in tablets, where NVIDIA has had a good start. The two companies are locked in a messaging tussle - throwing FUD at each other via us tech hacks.
NVIDIA's next-gen Kal-El Tegra chip is due to make an appearance sometime soon, while Qualcomm's next gen SoC family - collectively called S4 by Qualcomm - isn't due to make an appearance until next year. So the fact that Qualcomm decided to release an S4 whitepaper over the weekend is unlikely to have been a coincidence.
There wasn't a lot of completely new information, but a bit more detail about exactly what we can expect in terms of performance in devices bearing the first S4 chip, which is called the MSM8960. This will be the first to be manufactured on the 28nm process and the first to feature the first new CPU core - Krait - since Snapdragon was was first launched. It will have two of them, as you can see from the diagram below.
Not only does Krait offer around 1.6 times more performance per clock than the current core - Scorpion - the architecture and the 28nm LP (low power) process means it uses less energy in doing so. It also uses the Adreno 225 GPU, which has 1.5 times more performance than the current best effort, and six times faster than the GPU in the original Snapdragon.
