Qualcomm will ship 1.5GHz dual-core snapdragons in Q4, phones may come as early as Christmas

Qualcomm announced today that they will begin to ship their fastest ever mobile processor — a dual core Snapdragon running at up to 1.5GHz — come Q4 of this year.

The part of this news that excites me is that Qualcomm reckon that those manufacturers equipped with ninja skills may even have dual-core handsets out in time for Christmas.

It’s quite probable that dual-core phones won’t ship until early 2011, but I’m still excited at the prospect — especially as I’m using a 528MHz HTC Hero.

The new chips will allow 1080p video playback and HDMI out, which is pretty cool, if total overkill for a phone with limited storage space.

The chips also support individual voltage scaling, meaning that one of the cores can be effectively turned off when not in use, saving the juice in your battery. Qualcomm claim a 30% battery life increase over single-core chips because of this technology. Nice.

[via PhoneArena]