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Asus Transformer Drops Quad-core In Favor of Dual-core
MrSeb writes with this news from Extreme Tech: "In a move that will shock and disgust bleeding-edge technophiles everywhere, Asus has announced at Mobile World Congress 2012 that its new Transformer Pads — the high-end Infinity Series — will use the recently-announced dual-core Qualcomm S4 SoC. The critically acclaimed Transformer Prime, the Infinity Series' predecessor which was released at the end of 2011, used the quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3. Why the sudden about-face? Well, the fact that quad-core processors don't really have a use case in mobile devices is one reason — but it doesn't hurt that the Krait cores in the S4 are significantly faster than the four Cortex-A9 cores in the Tegra 3, too. The S4 is also the first 28nm SoC, while Tegra 3 is still on 40nm, which means a smaller and cheaper package, and lower power consumption to boot. The S4 is also the first SoC with built-in LTE, which was probably a rather nice sweetener for Asus."
The Snapdragon S4 "Krait" CPU is still a bit shrouded in mystery as far as hard specs (Qualcomm has never been one to release docs), but it appears to be similar to the Cortex-A15 in performance; how they stand up to Intel's new Medfield designs remains to be seen.
From what I articles I saw yesterday I gathered that there would be two levels of the new Asus pads. One with the Tegra and the other with the new Krait. Here is one article that talks about it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5586/the-asus-transformer-pad-infinity-1920-x-1200-display-krait-optional
Of course we won't know anything for sure until Asus releases the product details.
They announced two Infinity models. Once of them has LTE/3G and the dual-core S4, the other is Wi-fi only and is still toting a 1.6GHz Tegra 3.
And behold, a command prompt and he who sat upon it, his name was shutdown and -h 3:11 followed with him