The New Nexus 7 Has A Secret To Tell

The new Nexus 7 has a secret to tell

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu

...

All Articles by Stefan Constantinescu

Published 29 Jul 2013

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Both the LG Nexus 4 released last year and the ASUS Nexus 7 released this year use a chip called the “Snapdragon S4 Pro”, but are they really the same chip? The S4 Pro inside the Nexus 4 has four Krait 200 cores, whereas the 2013 Nexus 7 has four Krait 300 cores. And while the Nexus 4 uses LPDDR2 RAM, the 2013 Nexus 7 uses more advanced PCDDR3L RAM.

To quote Brian Klug from AnandTech:

“Although Qualcomm is calling the APQ8064 inside the Nexus 7 (2013) S4 Pro, it’s more like an underclocked or lower binned Snapdragon 600.”

What exactly does all this mean? When making the Snapdragon 600, Qualcomm probably had a bunch of parts that failed to operate at 1.7 GHz. Instead of throwing those chips in the garbage, the company simply lowered the clocked speed a bit and rebranded them as the S4 Pro. Every chip maker does this, it’s a process known as binning.

So the next time you hear someone say that the Nexus 7 isn’t a great product because it uses “last year’s chip”, then remind said person of the price tag and link them to Brian’s article.