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
SoC	Process Node	CPU	GPU	Memory Bus	Release
Apple A5	45nm	2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1GHz	PowerVR SGX 543MP2	2 x 32-bit LPDDR2	Now
NVIDIA Tegra 2	40nm	2 x ARM Cortex A9 @ 1GHz	GeForce	1 x 32-bit LPDDR2	Now
NVIDIA Tegra 3/Kal-El	40nm	4 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ ~1.3GHz	GeForce++	1 x 32-bit LPDDR2	Q4 2011
Samsung Exynos 4210	45nm	2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.2GHz	ARM Mali-400 MP4	2 x 32-bit LPDDR2	Now
Samsung Exynos 4212	32nm	2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.5GHz	ARM Mali-400 MP4	2 x 32-bit LPDDR2	2012
TI OMAP 4430	45nm	2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.2GHz	PowerVR SGX 540	2 x 32-bit LPDDR2	Now
TI OMAP 4460	45nm	2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.5GHz	PowerVR SGX 540	2 x 32-bit LPDDR2	Q4 11 - 1H 12
TI OMAP 4470	45nm	2 x ARM Cortex A9 w/ MPE @ 1.8GHz	PowerVR SGX 544	2 x 32-bit LPDDR2	1H 2012
TI OMAP 5	28nm	2 x ARM Cortex A15 @ 2GHz	PowerVR SGX 544MPx	2 x 32-bit LPDDR2	2H 2012
Qualcomm MSM8x60	45nm	2 x Scorpion @ 1.5GHz	Adreno 220	2 x 32-bit LPDDR2*	Now
Qualcomm MSM8960	28nm	2 x Krait @ 1.5GHz	Adreno 225	2 x 32-bit LPDDR2	1H 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.