Hands-On With Qualcomm’s Snappy Snapdragon S4 Pro Tablet - wyantposeed
Deem on tight, because a new speedster is coming to phones and tablets. Yesterday, Qualcomm unveiled its quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor. The company may constitute late to the quad-core political party, but if our earliest look at the $1300 reference design tablet for developers is some denotation of what to expect from actual shipping products, Qualcomm has brought its A-game and will comprise capable of delivering top-notch performance.
I exhausted hours digging deep into this tablet, learning more about the chip, lengthways benchmarks, and loading it with my own content; I far left encouraged by what I power saw. This was not the S4 Pro's first unveiling; we've been quick-eared about this chip all year. But Qualcomm has declared that information technology is finally sampling the chip and making it available to manufacturers, which means that we should see products using the S4 Pro debuting in clock time for the vacation shopping season.
Qualcomm also took the unusual step of allowing full access to its denotation invention tablet. This tablet lacked the finesse of what I'd expect from a commercial put out, though IT appeared built from many of the rougher designs I'd seen demoed earlier in the year. It's thicker than you'd expect, and heavier, with 1366-by-768-pel resolution and a vast strain gap connected the cover.
By having full access to this reference design—dubbed an MDP/T, or raisable development platform tablet, and the first device to habit the Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor—we had the chance to run this central processing unit through its paces at first-hand, those paces including both raw benchmarking and user experience.
Besides the S4 Pro processor, the tablet has 2GB of RAM and 32GB of memory board, and runs a stock version of Mechanical man 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. (Qualcomm has 4.1 Jelly Attic operative in its labs, and plans to provide an upgrade when it's ready.) The 2GB of RAM (as an alternative of 1GB) is neither necessary nor a minded for the S4 Pro platform, according to Qualcomm. We were told that the MDP/T includes 2GB to a greater extent operating theater fewer because the company wanted to backpack it to its fullest for developers; but the tablet standard today is 1GB, and Qualcomm indicated that the extra RAM shouldn't directly affect public presentation, as presently no applications would subscribe vantage of it.
Benchmark Star
On six of the benchmarks that we use regularly in PCWorld Labs examination, this MDP outscored our entire field of Android tablets, and came finisher to the Apple iPad than any other theoretical account in our GLBenchmark tests. If the MDP tablet's execution carries all over to the literal shipping product, Qualcomm's S4 Pro could personify the new performance leader for Humanoid tablets.
In the current Android tablet field of operations are many models with Nvidia's Tegra 3 political platform, the quickest Nvidia competition for the Snapdragon system-happening-chip, or SoC. Earlier this year, a leaked Nvidia roadmap indicated that the company was preparation the Tegra 4 for the prototypal quarter of 2022; if that plan holds, and wasn't accelerated for a release late this class, Snapdragon could be the snappiest SoC just about for holiday shoppers.
The about straight-from-the-shoulder matchup is between the S4 Pro MDP/T and the Nvidia Tegra 3-founded Asus Transformer Pad Eternity, the best of our Android performers until now. On some prosody, the performance gap was clearer than on others. On the Geekbench benchmark, the S4 Pro MDP/T was 23 percent faster than the Infinity; but on AndEBench's native test, the S4 Pro MDP/T was only 2 percent quicker.
The S4 Pro MDP/T blasted through tests involving Web browsing. Happening AndEBench's Java test, the S4 Pro MDP/T was 15 percent quicker, which may be a testament to or s of the Web browsing performance enhancements that Qualcomm has discussed focusing on with the S4 Pro SoC. And on Sunspider, the S4 Pro MDP/T complete the benchmark in 1.2 seconds, 37 percent less time than the Infinity, and 28 percentage to a lesser extent clip than the Google Nexus 7, one of our former stars on this test.
We secondhand GLBenchmark to measure the graphics execution of the new Adreno 320 graphics processor that's in the S4 Pro's system-on-chip. Here, the S4 Pro MDP/T ran off from the eternal rest of the Android theatre: Connected Egypt Offscreen, it scored 132 frames per second, and happening In favou Offscreen it scored 183 FPS. We habituate Offscreen to measure performance because it's a truer torture test of the chip's graphics potential, without factoring in closure constraints. Away comparison, the Apple iPad scored 139 fps and 244 fps severally. And the Asus Transformer Pad Eternity scored 74 fps and 96 fps, respectively.
Happening deuce other bench mark tests, the S4 Pro MDP/T continued to show its mettle. On Nenamark 2, it scored 60 fps to the Infinity's 40 fps, and on Basemark Taiji Free, it scored a 60, to the Asus's 7.
Real-World Practice
Spell the S4 Pro clearly excelled in the numbers it posted, the sincere proof lies in how the S4 Pro chopine could improve the user experience through with better performance. Experience can be a tricky thing to measuring, though, presumption that even if a system-on-chip platform has the potency to do X in performance, the software system that you're running on it may non cost optimized to take advantage of that big businessman.
Soh what did I run across during my time using the tablet?
The S4 Pro MDP/T may have the potential to be superfast at Web browse, merely my ability to gauge this systematically was constrained by the hotel conference area's Wi-Fi connection. It seemed to load pages rapidly, just the experience was mixed (and opposite tablets struggled at the same time, overly).
Happening Basemark Taiji Free, graphic symbol movement was smoother on the S4 In favor MDP/T than on the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity, which stuttered its way through the Taiji do.
The game Dead Trigger—which is optimized for Nvidia's Tegra 3—had smoother panning movements through the starting represent on the Tegra 3-based Asus Transformer Pad Infinity than on the S4 Pro MDP/T. I also saw few antialiasing effects around the lines of the bridge, and more detail in the waves than on the S4 Pro tablet.
Some other Tegra 3-optimized game, Riptide GP, lacked the block out splashes and some of the personal effects set up when playing the game on Tegra 3 tablets; but I couldn't detect any significant speed differences in how the game performed between the S4 In favor of and the Infinity.
My standard go-to mental testing for any tablet is to load folders of high-resolution images to the tablet and construe with how the Google Heading handles the images. Turns impossible the S4 Pro is a pro Here: Happening the MDP/T, I slammed through much 100 images in an record album, and watched the thumbnails redraw more quickly than along the Asus Infinity. I also found that there was no redraw lag as I zoomed in and out of images and panned around them. This sort of performance could be a immense boon for photographers and photo enthusiasts.
Other point that affected: the camera's performance. I'm non talking about megapixels and image output, but kinda the performance for image capture. When I fired up the television camera, I immediately noticed that Qualcomm's discourse rising the camera on the S4 Pro wasn't just now talk: The camera was more than responsive than typical Android tablets at focusing, capturing the look-alike once you press the capture push button on-screen, and recycling to let you capture another double in quick succession. Often, the incarcerate on that process can be interminable on Android tablets and renders those cameras frustrative to use.
A Qualcomm software engineer revealed to me in detail that the processing of the frames coming through and through the camera sensing element goes through Qualcomm's video processing in its hardware pipeline, where those frames get ironware acceleration on the S4 In favor of CPU before acquiring rendered through the Android framework. Qualcomm says it is using Video for Linux 2 A the interface between the camera application and their railway locomotive and camera processing. The focusing algorithms are done past Qualcomm, too.
What Lies Forrade
No question that the Qualcomm S4 Pro APQ8064 system-on-chip is poised to turn heads when tablets (and phones) using the platform surface later this year. Qualcomm says to expect the platform to appear for Android first, though clearly it was designed with Windows 8 in head arsenic well. The reference excogitation itself supports Windows-friendly 1366-past-768-pixel resolution, and even has a USB 3.0 connector and PCI-to-USB 3.0 bridge over on get on, and IT can support a engorged-size Coyote State card slot or USB port wine in addition to those for microSD and microUSB already found on the MDP/T.
The bigger question in my brain is how bequeath this "pure" experience interpret into the products we see at market, with whatever software enhancements, component choices, or tweaks that individual manufacturers take to use. As journalists, we rarely get a chance to get this sort of hands-on experience with a quotation design, so I have no comparison directly from other chip makers. But I do know that the raw intention is one thing, and a aggregate-market, manufactured consumer production are two totally different things.
The effect is that Qualcomm is jumping into the tablet space in a big way with the S4 Pro, and is providing a dispute to Nvidia's current domination of the Android tablet space. The forthcoming months should raise pretty exciting, with both Qualcomm and, eventually, Intel getting into an increasingly competitive tablet market.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/460149/hands_on_with_qualcomms_snappy_snapdragon_s4_pro_tablet.html
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