The Snapdragon S4 family is growing again today as Qualcomm is announcing and showing off its Snapdragon MSM8960Pro and APQ8064 variants of its Krait architecture. Both are based on the same 28nm process as their other S4 parts, but come standard with Qualcomm’s new Adreno 320 graphics processor, with expected speeds of up to four times faster than the current Adreno 225 GPU.
The 8960Pro, as expected, is the same 1.5Ghz dual-core chip with a new graphics chip, while the APQ8064 is a quad-core variant at 1.5Ghz without any cellular baseband inside. These are used when OEMs want to customize or install their own baseband chips and just use the processor/graphics combo.
Adreno 320 is a high-performing chip, and has been optimized for Windows 8 on ARM as well as Android tablets. It supports popular gaming engines like Epic and Unity, and will come with support for APIs like OpenCL. While it’s not expected to see the Adreno 320 inside a smartphone until early 2013, these chips will be sourced for tablets and laptops starting in Q3 2012.
Source: Yahoo Finance, Anandtech
