Monday, February 14, 2011

Qualcomm Announces New Snapdragon Lineup with Quad-Core

Qualcomm SnapdragonDuring MWC, Qualcomm has announced its latest update to its Snapdragon processor lineup with its first quad-core unit in the APQ8063.

The chipsets will be manufactured on a new 28nm process and will feature WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, FM, NFC support and stereoscopic 3D video / photo capture and playback, with multi-mode LTE modem integration. Qualcomm claims a performance increase of 150 percent and a power consumption drop of 65 percent over current ARM designs. A new Adreno 320 GPU with support for up to four cores is also included in the chipset design. Clockspeeds for the new chipsets will reach all the way up to 2.5GHz depending on the number of cores, with the APQ8063 being clocked at the aforementioned speed per core.

Samples for the dual-core MSM8960 will be available in second quarter of the year, while the single-core MSM8930 and quad-core APQ8063 are slated for sampling in early 2012, with commercial availability not known at this time.