Last year Qualcomm reorganized how it named its Snapdragon processors and divided them up into different series. Snapdragon S1 represented the first-gen chip found in the HTC Nexus One, then we had S2 and S3, followed by S4 that is currently featured in almost every 4G LTE phone in North America.
For awhile this made things simple as we could just reference the series of chip instead of having to call out the exact model number like MSM8960. When Android fans hear "Snapdragon S4″ they think of the super fast chip that is found in the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III, but there are actually four different tiers of S4 and they are not all created equal.
A perfect example is the Snapdragon S4 Play, featured in the new HTC Desire X. One could see the "S4″ and think they were getting Qualcomm's latest 28nm Krait CPU and faster Adreno GPU, but this budget chip uses the older 45nm process technology and slower Cortex-A5 CPU and Adreno 203 GPU.
If our numbers are correct, there are currently 15
