The fog of product launches obscures so much. But Qualcomm confirmed today in a blog post(Opens in a new window) that the new Samsung Galaxy S4 will launch with a 1.9-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor, not the slightly older S4 Pro that Samsung mentioned yesterday.

This is especially important for U.S. users because, while Qualcomm and Samsung aren’t saying, U.S. models of the phone are likely to run on Qualcomm’s chip rather than Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa because of Qualcomm’s strong relationships with U.S. carriers. Our former editor-in-chief, Michael J. Miller, explained some of the differences between the two chips in a column he wrote at CES.

The S4 will be the third phone with the new chip, but it might be the first to hit the U.S. The other two Snapdragon 600 phones announced were the HTC One and LG Optimus G Pro. The HTC One still lacks a hard release date in the U.S., and the Optimus G Pro hasn’t even been announced for our market at all.

The Snapdragon 600 is a quad-core processor using Qualcomm’s custom ARM-compatible Krait cores. According to Qualcomm, it delivers 40 percent better performance than the quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro seen in phones like the LG Optimus G and HTC Droid DNA. The difference in speed should be even greater when compared to the dual-core, slower-clocked Snapdragon S4 in the U.S. versions of the Galaxy S III .

We compared the S4, S4 Pro, Snapdragon 600, and Nvidia’s upcoming Tegra 4 in benchmarks at Mobile World Congress. The Tegra 4 came out fastest, but it hasn’t been installed in any actual retail smartphones yet. The Snapdragon 600-powered HTC One scored nearly four times as fast as the U.S. Galaxy S III on the AnTuTu benchmark, which makes heavy use of multiple cores.

As Samsung would undoubtably say, though, the proof here is in the experience – both the smoothness of average uses and the length of the phone’s battery life. To find out how the Snapdragon 600 performs in those regards, we’ll have to fully test the new Galaxy S4 when it comes out on six U.S. carriers between April and June of this year.

For more, see our full Hands On With the Samsung Galaxy S4 as well as 9 Cool Features on the Samsung Galaxy S4.