Qualcomm made a big announcement in the progress of mobile chipsets today. They’re beefing up their SnapDragon line by a large margin to offer blazing processor speeds for the handsets that use them. The 45NM (We’re talking nano-meters) chipset technology will vastly improve process power and battery life, giving consumers hardware that is up to par with new mobile operating systems that will utilize them. These top-shelf chips, bench-marked at 1.3GHz, are said to use 30 percent less power than their predecessors and will have a meek stand-by power-draw of less than 10 miliwatts. Plus, they managed to squeeze Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi, and a ton of other features right on board.
Don’t expect these beauties in any handsets in the near-futures: the scheduled sampling will begin its run in late 2009, and there’s bound to be a nice, long testing period to follow. We can’t wait.
“This latest addition to the growing family of Snapdragon chipsets will help our customers to develop faster, more power-efficient smartphones and smartbooks,” said Luis Pineda, senior vice president of marketing and product management at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. “This new 45 nm device shows our continued commitment to extending the capabilities of the Snapdragon platform with leading-edge process technology and an expanded list of integrated features.”
The QSD8650A chipset offers an exceptionally high level of integration. In addition to its faster processor and faster bus speed, the new QSD8650A chipset also offers multi-mode UMTS and CDMA 3G mobile broadband connectivity in the same 15x15mm package as current Snapdragon chipsets. A standalone, power-efficient 2D graphics accelerator and enhanced 3D graphics core deliver a powerful multimedia experience with better performance of Adobe® Flash® software. It also features integrated GPS and high-definition video recording and playback, the latest Bluetooth® 2.1 technology and support for Wi-Fi , high-resolution WXGA displays and mobile TV technologies such as MediaFLO™, DVB-H and ISDB-T.