[Galaxy S 4 General] BarryH_GEG:
One of the points OP made that's spot on is how competitive the mobile SoC business is. Unless Samsung's planning to exit the business which nothing points to, they'll have to keep innovating and providing cost effective, powerful, and energy efficient solutions to power not only future Samsung devices but other manufacturer's devices as well. Designing, engineering, and producing a SoC costs several hundred million dollars. Committing to big.LITTLE wasn't a "throw it against the wall and see if it'll stick" decision.

Samsung's supposed to sell 80MM SGS4's this year which means 24MM (1/3) of them will be Octa. HTC's projecting 20MM One's. That means there will be more Octa devices produced than all of HTC's flagship S-600 device. So I'd hardly call it a failure. And it’s great that Samsung’s experimenting with Intel. The 10.1” G-Tab 3 that’s supposed to have an Intel chip will probably sell 10MM units; if it’s the only SoC used which some are speculating it’ll only be for certain markets.

Here are some excerpts from Samsung’s Q1 earning’s release talking about their semi-conductor business. It certainly doesn’t sound like the division is in trouble or Samsung’s walking away from it any time soon.

As for this year's capital expenditure, Samsung Electronics executed a combined total of 3.9 trillion won for the quarter. The

Semiconductor

and Display Panel segments were

each accountable for 1.5 trillion won ($1.3B USD) in capex spending

. Samsung is poised to increase investment beginning from the second half of the fiscal year to preempt rising demand for differentiated products and to harness its competitiveness in the high-tech industry.

Samsung's Semiconductor businesses - including Memory and System LSI - posted consolidated 8.58 trillion won in revenue ($2.8B USD)

, a 11-percent drop from a quarter earlier. The Memory chip unit logged 5.12 trillion won in earnings but, compared with the previous period, quarter-on-quarter revenue retreated 4 percent.Profitability for the System LSI Business was hampered by seasonally slow demand in set products that use logic chips.​

Considering Octa is "V1" and that it out-benchmarks S-600 and gets very close to the same battery life the way it was shipped I'd very much call it a success. S-600 is nothing more than an evolution of previous Snapdragon chips. So that Samsung/ARM's first use of big.LITTLE is so competitive against a years old architecture that OEM’s are comfortable with implementing says a lot about what Samsung/ARM have done and what the upside potential is.

AnandTech talking about S4 - At present, this is the same Krait CPU as what we've seen in MSM8960 in phones like the USA versions of the Galaxy S 3 and HTC One X. Later on, Krait v3 will emerge with higher IPC and shorter critical paths (and clocks up to 1.7 or 2 GHz) and a resulting 10-15% boost in performance. For now however we're looking at 1.5 GHz APQ8064 with a Krait v2 inside and Qualcomm's newest scalar GPU architecture with Adreno 320.​

AnandTech talking about S-600 - Also being announced today is the Snapdragon 600. This part integrates four Krait 300 cores running at up to 1.9GHz. Adreno 320 handles GPU duties, although with an increased clock speed. Compared to the current Snapdragon S4, the 600 is expected to improve performance by up to 40% if you combine IPC and frequency increases.​