In a surprising move the eagerly awaited Samsung Galaxy SIII which will be revealed in London on May 3 is already showing up for pre-orders in Germany.
Amazon.de, but other large German post order companies as well, list the new phone as of today for a phone only price of 599E. For that price you get Android 4.0, a 12 Mpixel camera, 16GB memory and a 4.7″ screen. The graphic chip is not listed but the first benchmarks of the Galaxy SIII also surfaced today and show it will have the fastest graphics on any phone ever!
The new Galaxy expected to formally debut in just over a week was spotted on the GLBenchmark website. Before the uploader could remove it an observant user made a screenshot which shows a spectacular graphic speed.
Faster than everything except the new iPad, but hands down the performance king in smart phones.
OpenGL Test: Egypt Pro
GT-i9300 (Galaxy S III) 92fps 129fps
Galaxy S II 53fps 84fps
Galaxy Note 49fps 77fps
HTC One X 64fps 92fps
Apple iPhone 4S 73fps 121fps
Apple new iPad 41fps 252fps
Amazing as the new Samsung was not expected to use a new GPU, but the ´old´ Mali 400. Either the chip will be clocked at twice the original speed because Samsung now manufacturers it on a 32nm process OR they managed to get the new Mali 403 chip on board.
The last seems unlikely as that GPU is just too new to already materialize in a shipping product. Running the old Mali on 400 Mhz is not as far fetched as it sounds as a huge step forward in the manufacturing process will keep power consumption and heat within acceptable margins.
Realize this is only the graphics performance of a prototype. The overal performance will be determined by the CPU as well. With a quad-core Exynos 4412 it will be no slouch at all. It will almost certainly be the performance king there as well.
For those of you not as well versed in all mobile processor models, this will be Samsungs own implementation of the four core British ARM A9 design which can be found in the new iPad as well. Although Apple didn´t reveal the clockspeed it´s rumoured to be 1Ghz, while the Samsung version will run at 1,4Ghz.
It looks like the Galaxy SIII will have the fastest graphics of all mobiles and based on it´s CPU it can be expected to be at least on par with the new iPad when running browser benchmarks.
Samsung´s strategy seems to be to make the most of its manufacturing advantage: they are, next to Huawei, the only company who is producing its own chips so they have full control over the latest technology in optimized chips. With these high clock speeds for CPU and GPU the Koreans seem to make the best of their advantage.
We are very interested in the why of Samsung´s decision to do a pre-order campaign in Germany. Could this be related to the huge battle with Apple on the German market where court orders currently restrict Apple from using iMessenger and iCloud. Rumor has it that Samsung will launch its own cloud storage at the same time they reveal the new model so they could try to deliver a decisive blow on the economically very interesting German market.
Meanwhile Samsung is still making pot shots at Apple with its latest Galaxy SIII video which tries to make fun of the Apple sheep buyers.
Will you pre-order it or wait until the smoke clears from the epic Apple-Samsung battle?
Author: Max Huijgen
links:
benchmarks: http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-GT-I9300-Galaxy-S-III-graphics-benchmark-appears-poised-to-rule-them-all_id29364#1-Samsung-Galaxy-S-III-with-ARM-Mali-400