Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 MSM8660 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8230

Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 MSM8660

The Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 MSM8660 is an entry level SoC for smartphones and tablets (mostly Android based). It contains two Scorpion cores (enhanced ARM Cortex-A8) clocked at up to 1.7 GHz, a Adreno 220 graphics card and radio elements (including CDMA2000, which is the difference to the MSM8260).

Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8230

The Qualcomm MSM8230 (Snapdragon S4 Plus series) is a ARM based high-end smartphone SoC in 2012. It contains two Krait (ARMv7) CPU cores at up to 1.2 GHz, a Adreno 305 GPU, a single channel LPDDR2 memory controller and radio elements.  The chip is produced in 28nm LP (low power process) at TSMC. Compared to the MSM8930, the 8230 lacks LTE.

The Krait cores offer a slightly better performance as the standard Cortex-A9 cores and are compatible to the NEON SIMD extensions.