Less than a week after the unveiling of the Galaxy S4, the new Android superphone has already been subjected to the rigorous testing of Geekbench 2.
PrimateLabs founder John Poole has conducted benchmarks with the S4, including comparisons to competing smartphones - the HTC One, LG Nexus 4, Galaxy S3 (Exynos 4412), iPhone 5, BlackBerry Z10 and Galaxy S3 (Snapdragon MSM8690).
The newly announced Galaxy S4, which is set to be available to consumers in April, scored a 3,163 on the standard Geekbench 2 speed test, not far from double the iPhone 5"s score of 1,596. The S4"s score also far exceeded the HTC One, Nexus 4 and the previous iteration of the device, the Galaxy S3.
Most impressively, the test was performed using the slower edition of the S4. The U.S. version of Samsung"s new flagship smartphone will be powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset, featuring an integrated LTE radio. The U.S. version of the S4 will, however, be exceeded greatly by the international version of the device which packs an eight-core Exynos processor.
The "eight core" claim associated with the international S4 version is a little misleading though. Whilst the Exynos 5 Octa chip technically holds eight distinct cores, the "big.LITTLE" arrangement created by ARM holds two processors that engage depending on the needs of user-performed tasks - one high-powered quad-core Cortex-A15 running at at 1.2GHz and one quad-core Cortex-A7 running at 1.6GHz.
Source: Primate Labs | Image via Primate Labs