Snapdragon S4 delivers 'smooth' Ice Cream Sandwich

Qualcomm's newest Snapdragon S4 chip has racked up benchmark numbers far surpassing the Samsung Galaxy S II's performance, while turning Ice Cream Sandwich on dual-core phones into a "butter smooth" experience, according to a chip review site.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 outperformed Samsung Galaxy S II in Linpack benchmarks. Image credit: Anandtech

"Occasionally we'll see performance numbers that just make us laugh at their absurdity," Anandtech said in a post on Tuesday. "[Snapdragon S4's] Linpack performance is no exception. The performance advantage here is insane. The MSM8960 is able to deliver more than twice the performance of any currently shipping SoC (system-on-a-chip)."

Coupled with the dual-channel memory, a 50 percent increase in the Adreno 225 GPU's clock speed adds up to a sizable advantage over the previous Snapdragon's graphics engine, Anandtech said, though Apple's A5 GPU is still faster at higher resolutions.

"The [S4] is the absolute fastest we've seen Ice Cream Sandwich thus far," Anandtech said. "The UI is absolutely butter smooth everywhere, and web browsing in either Chrome or the stock Android Browser is also the smoothest we've seen it. There's no stutter bringing up the application switcher, or taking screenshots — two places that 4.0.3 still drops frames on the Galaxy Nexus."

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Qualcomm S4 chip renders Ice Cream Sandwich 'butter smooth' on CNET News.