A Qualcomm software engineer revealed to me in detail that the processing of the frames coming through the camera sensor goes through Qualcomm's video processing in its hardware pipeline, where those frames get hardware acceleration on the S4 Pro processor before getting rendered through the Android framework. Qualcomm says it is using Video for Linux 2 as the interface between the camera application and their engine and camera processing. The focusing algorithms are done by Qualcomm, too.

No question that the Qualcomm S4 Pro APQ8064 system-on-chip is poised to turn heads when tablets (and phones) using the platform surface later this year. Qualcomm says to expect the platform to appear for Android first, though clearly it was designed with Windows 8 in mind as well. The reference design itself supports Windows-friendly 1366-by-768-pixel resolution, and even has a USB 3.0 connector and PCI-to-USB 3.0 bridge on board, and it can support a full-size SD card slot or USB port in addition to those for microSD and microUSB already found on the MDP/T.

The bigger question in my mind is how will this "pure" experience translate into the products we see at market, with whatever software enhancements, component choices, or tweaks that individual manufacturers choose to use. As journalists, we rarely get a chance to get this kind of hands-on experience with a reference design, so I have no comparison directly from other chip makers. But I do know that the raw design is one thing, and a mass-market, manufactured consumer product are two totally different things.

The upshot is that Qualcomm is jumping into the tablet space in a big way with the S4 Pro, and is providing a challenge to Nvidia's current domination of the Android tablet space. The upcoming months should prove pretty interesting, with both Qualcomm and, eventually, Intel getting into an increasingly competitive tablet market.