Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Qualcomm's New Snapdragon S4: MSM8960 & Krait Architecture


Qualcomm reveals its new processor Snapdragon S4 on its white paper. Here’s a block diagram of the chip from the Qualcomm White Paper:

It claims that this aSMP (asynchronous Symmetric Multi-Processor) approach delivers a 25 to 40% improvement in operating power for a given performance, as you can see in the following graph:


Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi compared the Snapdragon S4 with other chips:

2011/2012 SoC Comparison
SoCProcess NodeCPUGPUMemory BusRelease
Apple A545nm2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1GHzPowerVR SGX 543MP22 x 32-bit LPDDR2Now
NVIDIA Tegra 240nm2 x ARM Cortex A9 @ 1GHzGeForce1 x 32-bit LPDDR2Now
NVIDIA Tegra 3/Kal-El40nm4 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ ~1.3GHzGeForce++1 x 32-bit LPDDR2Q4 2011
Samsung Exynos 421045nm2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.2GHzARM Mali-400 MP42 x 32-bit LPDDR2Now
Samsung Exynos 421232nm2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.5GHzARM Mali-400 MP42 x 32-bit LPDDR22012
TI OMAP 443045nm2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.2GHzPowerVR SGX 5402 x 32-bit LPDDR2Now
TI OMAP 446045nm2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.5GHzPowerVR SGX 5402 x 32-bit LPDDR2Q4 11 - 1H 12
TI OMAP 447045nm2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.8GHzPowerVR SGX 5442 x 32-bit LPDDR21H 2012
TI OMAP 528nm2 x ARM Cortex A15 @ 2GHzPowerVR SGX 544MPx2 x 32-bit LPDDR22H 2012
Qualcomm MSM8x6045nm2 x Scorpion @ 1.5GHzAdreno 2202 x 32-bit LPDDR2*Now
Qualcomm MSM896028nm2 x Krait @ 1.5GHzAdreno 2252 x 32-bit LPDDR21H 2012

They pointed out "Other than TI's OMAP 5 in the second half of 2012 and Qualcomm's Krait, no one else has announced plans to release a new microarchitecture in the near term. Furthermore, if we only look at the first half of next year, Qualcomm is the only company that's focused on significantly improving per-core performance through a new architecture. Everyone else is either scaling up in core count (NVIDIA) or clock speeds. As we've seen in the PC industry however, generational performance gaps are hard to overcome - even with more cores or frequency."

The performance is expected a big improvement over previous architectures.


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