[General Questions and Answers] sreza:
You can't judge technology by it's benchmark scores alone. Let me try and make a good analogy to explain this....

Let's say you're shopping for cars. Car 1 (Tegra 3) has a much higher top speed than Car 2 (Krait). It can go up to 300 miles an hour while Car 2 can only go up to 200. Judging by that fact alone, it's "obvious" that Car 1 is better.

But, don't roads have speed limits? What's the point of a car that can go to 300 miles per hour if the highest possible speed limit is only 70? I doubt you'd ever get a chance to go 300 miles an hour, even if the benchmarks say that you theoretically could.

This is the limitation of the Android Market. Developers won't want to make an app that takes full advantage of Tegra 3 because if they did so their app wouldn't be able to sell to weaker phones. Tegra 3 will be a small part of the Android community, even if there was no Krait to counter it, simply because it's the expensive high-end phone. Developers will always prefer making $1 dollar on 10 million devices than $20 on 100,000.

Now, let's consider other factors. When you drive, you're constantly accellerating and decelerating. Stop light to stop light or whenever you take a turn. Let's say Car 1 goes from 0 to 60 in 10 seconds, while Car 2 goes 0 to 60 in 6 seconds. Car 2 will be much more useful for your daily driving needs. If you race from stop light to stop light, Car 2 will always get there first. In that same way, Krait is a more advanced chip than Tegra 3.

Let's consider fuel efficiency. Tegra 3 has that huge top speed. But in return, if you want to go that fast you burn through your gas like nothing else. Car 1's engine goes at 15 miles per gallon. Car 2's engine, on the other hand, gets 30 miles per gallon. Therefore, you'll need to refuel on Car 2 only half as much as Car 1. Car 2 is twice as fuel-efficient as Car 1.

Tegra 3 is built at 40nm while Krait is built at 28nm. This results in the fact that, when the task is not the pinnacle of HD gaming, for any given task compared between Tegra 3 and Krait, if the task is multi-threaded, Krait and Tegra 3 will both finish the task at the same time, but Krait will use only half the battery power Tegra 3 needed to do so.

If that same task is not multi-threaded, as 99% of Android apps aren't, Krait will finish that task in half the time as Tegra 3 while still only using half the battery power.

If you don't pay attention to anything else about this post, read the sentence right above this one. Then read it again.

Any multi-threaded benchmark will show that Tegra 3 is the "stronger" device, but the environment is not optimized to take advantage of that power! Just like both of the cars above being limited to the speed limit on the highways you'd drive them on, the power of the Tegra 3 engine will be wasted by the environment that surrounds it.

You wouldn't get a special exemption from speed limits just because you have a very fast car, so why expect that to occur when buying a Tegra 3 device?

While on the other hand, the Krait chip is more dynamic, able to adjust to your needs on the fly, and optimized for the stuff you'll actually do day-to-day on your phone. Yet at the same time, will inherently do it all using half the battery power of Tegra 3.

I can't imagine someone wanting to buy Car 1 over Car 2, so why would you want to buy Tegra 3 over Krait S4?

Have you ever noticed that, while companies are putting Tegra 3 in their high end phones, the very highest end flapship phones are all getting Krait S4? This means something...