Published in PC Hardware

Qualcomm claims first 28nm part to market

by on28 October 2011



S4 MSM 8960 dual, 50 percent faster CPU and GPU


Qualcomm's director of product movement Travis Lanier has revealed a few more details on the company’s upcoming 28nm Krait processor.

He mentioned a few obvious things, such as compatibility with the old ARM instruction set, that new Krait processor is going to be 28nm and that dual-core comes first, with quad-core to follow.

The S4 MSM 8960 dual-core should be first to market with 28nm, this is what Travis told analysts at the conference call yesterday, so it better be true. Qualcomm claims the lead in both processing power and efficiency, which should be best in class.

The company expects a "50 percent performance improvement over other ARM based offerings in the mobile CPU market" and Qualcomm claims that 8960 dual-core Krait is 50 percent better than two Scorpion cores. The new CPU has a dial instead of power switch that can save somewhere between 25 percent in hardware and with the help of software it can save up to 40 percent of power compared to Scorpion cores shipping today. 

Tim Leland, Director or Product management, most likely graphics, also mentioned that S4 MSM 8960 has new Adreno graphics. It packs an Adreno 225 core that is some 50 percent faster than Adreno 220. This unified shader GPU that has some strong roots in ATI acquired technology is DirectX 9.3 (Shader model 3) capable.

Overall, S4 MSM 8960 looks like a very nice 28nm part with dramatically improved CPU and GPU performance compared to dual-cores manufactured in 40 / 45 nm processes.

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