Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8230 vs Rockchip RK3188

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.

Rockchip RK3188

The Rockchip RK3188 is a fast ARM SoC primarily designed for tablets. It integrates four ARM Cortex A9 cores with NEON extension and a clock speed of up to 1.8 GHz, a Mali-400 MP4 graphics card (up to 600 MHz, 24 GFLOPS) and a low-power (LP-)DDR2/DDR3 memory controller. Due to the high clock rates, the performance of the CPU and GPU is superior to other Cortex-A9 quad-cores such as the Nvidia Tegra 3 and Samsung Exynos 4412. These high frequencies are possible due to the 28nm process (TSMC). However, this results in high power consumption and is thus not suited for compact smartphones.