Qualcomm shows off quad-core Snapdragon S4 pro reference tablet, tops benchmarks

Qualcomm showcased its reference design tablet for the Snapdragon S4 Pro SoC yesterday at a benchmarking event held in San Francisco. The 10.1-inch tablet is powered by the new quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor clocked at 1.5GHz, which also combines the new Adreno 320 GPU. The tablet is aimed at developers and is priced at an astronomical $1299, but considering the spec sheet one can’t help thinking how Qualcomm could have made this cheaper. Last week Qualcomm had unveiled its Snapdragon S4 Pro chip, which had four cores unlike the current crop of S4 chips that are equipped with twin cores.
The tablet also packs in 2GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage and comes loaded with a microUSB, microSD card slot, headphone jack and volume and orientation toggles. Qualcomm has gone all out and has installed a massive 13-megapixel camera, which can of course shoot 1080p video. From the looks of it the device ran Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
But the real mojo was left in the benchmarks, where the device just exterminated the current crop of top of the line smartphones and tablets in terms of pure benchmarking. Both Engadget and The Verge report that the S4 Pro scored in excess of 7,500 and 2,500 on Quadrant and Vellamo, in comparison to scores in the range of 5,000 and 2,000 for the Samsung Galaxy S III that ran the dual-core version of the Snapdragon S4 chip. (The Galaxy SIII runs on a dual-core Qualcomm S4 chipset with LTE in the US.)
If this is any indication of what’s to come, we can expect stellar performance via Snapdragon based devices both on Android and Windows RT.