Qualcomm announced to day that the Company will offer a Pro version of the Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 processor.

The S4 Pro processor features the Adreno 320 GPU, support for higher resolution displays, as well as hardware and software compatibility with the S4 class. The Adreno 320 is a high performance programmable GPU, with up to a four times performance improvement, on previous chips.

It will mean more power for Web browsing, games, user interfaces and other graphics applications. The Adreno 320 also gives the S4 Pro version new multimedia capabilities, including computational camera.  This can tap directly into the computational capability of the Adreno 320 GPU through new APIs like OpenCL, to enable next-generation use cases such as light-field cameras for mobile devices.

In support of next-generation 3D graphics APIs, Adreno 320 will enable more realistic 3D graphic effects through hardware acceleration of advanced rendering features like instancing, occlusion queries and multiple render targets. Adreno 320 also includes dedicated hardware to accelerate Windows and fully supports the top game engines in the industry from Unity, Epic and others.

Cristiano Amon, senior vice president of product management, Qualcomm. "By delivering the S4 Pro processor in 2012, we are fulfilling our promise that Snapdragon processors will remain the industry's barometer for excellence in mobile computing while helping our customers bring the most innovative smartphones and tablets to market."

No mention of price yet.