Snapdragon 600 based Galaxy S4 coming in US,Canada & Sweden

The Samsung I9500 Galaxy S4 is the first smartphone with an octa-core processor or at least in some regions. As expected, the North American versions of the phone will use a Snapdragon chipset instead (a 600 to be precise).

So, both the US and Canada are getting quad Krait 300 cores and Adreno 320 GPU instead of Cortex-A15 / A7 CPU cores (four of each) and PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU.

We expected that version to only be available in North America and the European version to use the Exynos 5 Octa chipset. The Swedish site for major European carrier Tele2, however, lists the Samsung Galaxy S4 on pre-order with the Snapdragon 600 chipset. The prices start at SEK 220 (about $34) per month on contract.

That’s a bit disappointing, but the Qualcomm-designed chipset should still offer stellar performance – better than the competing flagships, which use the same chip but at lower frequency.
Benchmarks point to great SunSpider performance – 822ms vs. 1124ms for the HTC One and 1336ms for the Sony Xperia Z. AnTuTu scores indicated a relatively modest increase in overall performance of about 30% for a score of 21, 089 vs. 22,678 for the HTC One and 20,794 for the Xperia Z.

It remains to be seen what kind of performance the Exynos 5 Octa will offer – AnTuTu’s publicly available benchmark doesn’t support the chipset and the scores the AnTuTu team posted from in-house testing can’t be compared to the old benchmarks.