New Nexus 7 has a quadcore Krait, ditches Tegra

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brixter11

Junior Member
Oct 19, 2011
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Instructions for computer neophytes on using the above link:

Scroll down to where it says "Geekbench 2 - Total Score"

Take note the min,avg, max score (1367-1395) of the 4470

Click the little plus mark next to "show comparison chart"

Take note of the location of OMAP 4470 on the chart.

Note that it says -3% next to Tegra 3. This means the Tegra 3 has a 3% lower score.

Take note of the location of the MSM8930. Note the -8% next to this chip.

Click on the link for the MSM8930. Note in the first sentence it is an S4 Plus.

Now go back to the geekbench scores under "show comparison chart" click on the MSM8260A.

Note the avg geekbench for this chip is lower than the 4470s.

Now scroll to the top. Note in sentence 2 of the description the word Krait :

"The Qualcomm MSM8260A (Snapdragon S4 series) is a ARM based high-end smartphone SoC in 2012. It contains two Krait (ARMv7) CPU cores..."

Now realize that the 4470 beats this dual core Krait. Also realize that we were talking about the S4, not the S4+, which has Krait cores.

This just goes to show the power of marketing and perception. Sexy words like Snapdragon,Krait, and Tegra win perception games against acronyms like OMAP. It's too bad we will never have an OMAP 5, the 4 was vastly underrated.

By the way, the picture you looked at was a sub test within Geekbench - stream. The overall score I was referring to includes integer, memory, float, and stream.

The MSM8930 is a lower end version of the MSM9860 which was released after it. It's usual clocked lower and only has single channel memory, as opposed to the higher end models with dual channel memory.

You also talk about a lower MSM8260A score, this if you look futher in to the result you will see that it came form a HTC One S, I suspect that bad/unstable firmware may have caused this lower score.
 

ChronoReverse

Platinum Member
Mar 4, 2004
2,562
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This just goes to show the power of marketing and perception. Sexy words like Snapdragon,Krait, and Tegra win perception games against acronyms like OMAP. It's too bad we will never have an OMAP 5, the 4 was vastly underrated

Please. For someone who is speaking so arrogantly, you're pretty good at cherry picking.

Why don't we take a look at a Snapdragon S4 Plus SoC that has dual-channel memory so it's a fair comparison to the 4470 platform with dual-channel memory in a benchmark that _includes memory bandwidth-type tests_?

1500 is the average for the HTC One XL btw.


I don't discount Tegra 3 didn't stand up to perception but claiming the S4 Plus wasn't at least faster than A9 cores clock-for-clock is ridiculous.
 
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sontin

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2011
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OMAP4 was not competitive. It was a 1,5DC SoC. Tegra 3 runs up to 1,4GHz with 4 Cores. The GPU performance was on par with Tegra 3. The SoC uses much more power than Tegra 3 for low performance tasks.
 

Face2Face

Diamond Member
Jun 6, 2001
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I have an S4 Pro in my Droid DNA and I must say it's a really smooth experience overall. There are some times when it can take a second to respond to open apps and things like that, but I don't think it's hardware related more software or Sense IMO. Having stock android could be a much smoother experience? There are some games @ 1080P that will make the Radeon ;) 320 stutter a little, but for the most part it's pretty strong and maintains pretty good avg fps.
 

monstercameron

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2013
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I wish threads like these took place in the gadgets section of AT. People in the cpu section of AT know so little about Arm and Arm like designs.

Holy crap. As stupid as I thought the Mobile section of AT is at times, this section is even dumber. I get it, you guys know your Ivy Bridges, Haswells, but dang theres so much misinformation about mobile CPUs here that it blows my mind....
 

monstercameron

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2013
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Holy crap. As stupid as I thought the Mobile section of AT is at times, this section is even dumber. I get it, you guys know your Ivy Bridges, Haswells, but dang theres so much misinformation about mobile CPUs here that it blows my mind....
plenty here understand most of it...
 

NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
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Holy crap. As stupid as I thought the Mobile section of AT is at times, this section is even dumber. I get it, you guys know your Ivy Bridges, Haswells, but dang theres so much misinformation about mobile CPUs here that it blows my mind....

Why not educate us then, oh great enlightened one. :rolleyes:
 

Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
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On the desktop I completely agree you can never have enough power. But on the tablet using at most one finger or two thumbs on a single app? And I've never noticed any slowness in rendering web pages on Nexus either 7 or S2.

You're always gonna be hindered/limited by the interface so again I ask, what need for all this CPU power? (obviously apart from running benchmarks and then being able to say HAHA Apple sucks/Nvidia sucks/Samsung sucks.

Like its been stated before, I use my nexus 7 for viewing documents, particularly PDFs and a few apps that are essentially large document repositories (ie Medscape). You can definitely notice hanging and pausing as the machine strains, even with simple 1-2 page PDFs. However, sometimes I can't differentiate if the bottle neck is with the CPU or the very slow flash equipped on the nexus. Anyway try it for yourself: download adobe reader and download some random file and you can see how the app struggles.
 

dragantoe

Senior member
Oct 22, 2012
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my favorite part about my nexus 7 was tegra zone, the games looked great and were made sure to run great on my tablet, with the s4, it's just going to be sluggish with upcoming games and there's no community built around it to make sure everything is perfect
 

monstercameron

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2013
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my favorite part about my nexus 7 was tegra zone, the games looked great and were made sure to run great on my tablet, with the s4, it's just going to be sluggish with upcoming games and there's no community built around it to make sure everything is perfect

not sure if joke else uninformed:rolleyes:...the consensus has been that quad qualcomm cores > quad a9[tegra] cores:colbert:. Also the gpu is about ~2-3x higher performing and with theoretical support of gles 3, maybe even tegra 4 would be inferior in "gaming."

p.s. tegrazone is a joke.:whiste:
 

jiffylube1024

Diamond Member
Feb 17, 2002
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The CPU performance will be massively better on the new N7 with quad core Krait. I hope that it really is 1080p IPS as well.

I'm a bit disappointed that it seems they are sticking with the 7" form factor; it would be a great time to move up to 7.7" for the N7. I had a nexus 7 and loved it but finally got rid of it after it completely died on me and I had to RMA it and lost everything saved on there (including a Final Fantasy 3 game save I put ~10 hours in). Between then and now I've tried other tablets and I feel that the iPad mini is about the perfect form factor (but the display is terrible). A 1080p 7.7" display would be about perfect, IMO. 7" is nice but a wee bit small for my tastes. I'll still check it out though - I hope they get the weight to 300g or under on this one!
 

Lepton87

Platinum Member
Jul 28, 2009
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I have N7 and I also think that 16:9 7'' screen is a bit too small. I wish they would ditch 16:9 and go with 16:10 8'' screen, but I'm sure they are going to stick with 16:9 screen.
 

dragantoe

Senior member
Oct 22, 2012
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not sure if joke else uninformed:rolleyes:...the consensus has been that quad qualcomm cores > quad a9[tegra] cores:colbert:. Also the gpu is about ~2-3x higher performing and with theoretical support of gles 3, maybe even tegra 4 would be inferior in "gaming."

p.s. tegrazone is a joke.:whiste:

yes, technically the qualcomm is more powerful (but neither the s4 pro in the n7 nor the snapdragon 800 touch the tegra 4 in terms of cpu or gpu performance) but things don't run smoothly on snapdragon like they do on tegra, i had a nexus 7 (tegra 3) and i have a droid dna (s4 pro quad) and even on the 720p n7 screen thd games looked better on the n7 compared to the non thd games on the 1080p dna simply due to optimization from nvidia.
a more powerful chip simply isn't everything and saying tegrazone is a joke is the same as saying steam is joke
 

joshhedge

Senior member
Nov 19, 2011
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yes, technically the qualcomm is more powerful (but neither the s4 pro in the n7 nor the snapdragon 800 touch the tegra 4 in terms of cpu or gpu performance) but things don't run smoothly on snapdragon like they do on tegra, i had a nexus 7 (tegra 3) and i have a droid dna (s4 pro quad) and even on the 720p n7 screen thd games looked better on the n7 compared to the non thd games on the 1080p dna simply due to optimization from nvidia.
a more powerful chip simply isn't everything and saying tegrazone is a joke is the same as saying steam is joke

I know very few people who have even heard of Tegra Zone, let alone used it. Tegra is a joke currently, I regret not going for the HTC One S rather than my One X.

There has got to be a reason why Qualcomm is getting in all of the designs while Tegra 4 is struggling to find any. (Power consumption, anyone?)
 
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monstercameron

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2013
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yes, technically the qualcomm is more powerful (but neither the s4 pro in the n7 nor the snapdragon 800 touch the tegra 4 in terms of cpu or gpu performance) but things don't run smoothly on snapdragon like they do on tegra, i had a nexus 7 (tegra 3) and i have a droid dna (s4 pro quad) and even on the 720p n7 screen thd games looked better on the n7 compared to the non thd games on the 1080p dna simply due to optimization from nvidia.
a more powerful chip simply isn't everything and saying tegrazone is a joke is the same as saying steam is joke

that is mostly a marketing trick, the first big tegra "optimized" game was dead trigger and those tegra optimizations could work on any handset. I don't know the full extent of the "optimization" but I am speculating, dxt texture support was the best most tegra optimized games had. The fact is that the s4 pro's cpu is faster, the gpu is 2-3x faster, supports opencl and gles 3 all while using less power, this was possible due to manu processes, be tegra 40nm and s4pro 28nm.

besides now even more people will optimize games for adreno...
 

Dribble

Platinum Member
Aug 9, 2005
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In my experience nexus 7 has been very solid for games - most have a setting (might not be the max) where they run smoothly. That's partly because the nexus 7 was popular, but I strongly suspect partly also because nvidia put some effort into it (tegra zone means devs can get help from nvidia to make the most of tegra devices).

I remember seeing reviews with nexus 4&10 where sure they were quicker but not everything ran properly on them.
 

jacktesterson

Diamond Member
Sep 28, 2001
5,493
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I remember seeing reviews with nexus 4&10 where sure they were quicker but not everything ran properly on them.

Not sure what games wouldn't play properly on a Nexus 4.

It would smoke a Tegra 3 too. Maybe Tegra Games your speaking of?

Nexus 10 I could see, mostly just due to the Resolution.
 

dragantoe

Senior member
Oct 22, 2012
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The fact is that the s4 pro's cpu is faster, the gpu is 2-3x faster, supports opencl and gles 3 all while using less power, this was possible due to manu processes, be tegra 40nm and s4pro 28nm.

besides now even more people will optimize games for adreno...

ok yes, the s4 pro is faster than the tegra 3, this is to be expected from a newer flagship chip, but we didn't want tegra 3 in the new nexus 7, we wanted tegra 4, which, in every possible way, is more powerful and more capable than the s4 pro, also, whether or not tegra optimization was a marketing trick, they made sure a lot of games ran smoothly on the tegra 3, it made the device more solid for gaming, I never know when games are going to run well on my droid dna, it's a hit and a miss kind of thing, but with my nexus 7, i could go to tegrazone and know for sure they would run well and look better
 

monstercameron

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2013
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ok yes, the s4 pro is faster than the tegra 3, this is to be expected from a newer flagship chip, but we didn't want tegra 3 in the new nexus 7, we wanted tegra 4, which, in every possible way, is more powerful and more capable than the s4 pro, also, whether or not tegra optimization was a marketing trick, they made sure a lot of games ran smoothly on the tegra 3, it made the device more solid for gaming, I never know when games are going to run well on my droid dna, it's a hit and a miss kind of thing, but with my nexus 7, i could go to tegrazone and know for sure they would run well and look better

ok I understand what you are saying but that bolded line has me concerned. tegra 4 needs a fan so a slim 7" tablet would have a horrible throttling issues [like the s4 does in the nexus 4]. Tegra 4 is for tablets [toshiba excite pro] and for small notebooks with active cooling and large batteries.
 

dragantoe

Senior member
Oct 22, 2012
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ok I understand what you are saying but that bolded line has me concerned. tegra 4 needs a fan so a slim 7" tablet would have a horrible throttling issues [like the s4 does in the nexus 4]. Tegra 4 is for tablets [toshiba excite pro] and for small notebooks with active cooling and large batteries.

there's two versions of the tegra 4, tegra 4 and 4i, the 4i is a low powered, underclocked version with 20 ish less gpu cores, it could fit in the nexus 7 and still outperform the s4
 

monstercameron

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2013
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there's two versions of the tegra 4, tegra 4 and 4i, the 4i is a low powered, underclocked version with 20 ish less gpu cores, it could fit in the nexus 7 and still outperform the s4

t4i is quad a9 supposedly able to clck at over 2GHz not a15 like big boy t4. I doubt it would outperform the s4 unless it was able to clock at 2.3Ghz. As for the gpu the 60 core setup on t4i has 5x the units so it is possible that performance is 5x but even at 5x performance performance would it be competitive?
 

sontin

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2011
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S4 Pro runs only around 1,6GHz because of the LP process. Tegra 4i clocks up to 2,3GHz. And the difference between A9r4 and the first version of Krait should be negligible.

GPU performance is another question but overall T4i is much better than S4Pro.

/edit: Here a few benchmarks: http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/0...pdragon-s4-pro-and-1920x1200-screen/#hardware

Much slower than for example the Toshiba Tablet with 1,8GHz Tegra 4. But on the other hand it should be much cooler while doing intensive tasks.
 
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