Samsung Galaxy S 4 benchmark tests (video)
Two versions of the Galaxy S 4 are in the cards - one with 1.9 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor, which will grace US carriers, and one with Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa internationally. Qualcomm integrates the LTE baseband radio in its Snapdragon SoCs directly and has tested the filters extensively with US carrier networks on its home turf, which explains to a great extent why Samsung went with the tried-and-true in the world's most visible mobile device market.
Snapdragon 600 has more power in it than Android and apps currently even need, given that phones with it consistently top 12 000 points on the Quadrant test, so no complaints. The larger mystery remains Exynos 5 Octa, which Samsung has clocked at 1.6 GHz in the S 4. It utilizes ARM's big.LITTLE architecture, and is built around four low-power Cortex-A7 cores for the mundane tasks like standby or UI navigation, and four Cortex-A15 ones for the heavy lifting, that's why it is labeled an octo-core chip, which is technically true, but in reality it will never power all eight cores at once, and max them out. With a quad-core PowerVR SGX544 GPU inside, the Exynos 5 Octa is blazing through graphics loads, too.
Take a look at how a preproduction version of the Galaxy S IV with the Snapdragon chip for US markets fares on some standard synthetic benchmarks in our hands-on tests below.
width="680">
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: