Over the past year, Qualcomm has added a dose of glamour to chipsets, with many of our commenters regularly lambasting manufacturers for not choosing Snapdragon for their products. Those arguments look set to become even more regular, now Qualcomm’s confirmed quad-core Snapdragons are on their way, for at least 12x the added performance of what’s most likely in your smartphone now.
Both Apple’s iPhone and iPad and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips are based on ARM architecture, as are almost all mobile phone processors. But where is Intel and the x86? Can the world’s largest semiconductor company thwart the public’s embrace of ARM?
Admittedly, I was a little disappointed to discover the G2′s new Snapdragon processor is only clocked at 800MHz, but according to some leaked figures from GLBenchmarks, it should run at around the same speed as Motorola’s Droid X and 2.
Unfortunately we won’t be seeing any 1.5GHz Snapdragon-powered smartphones before the end of 2011, after Qualcomm’s CEO mistakenly told assembled gatherers at an event today that they’d be arriving in Q1. What he meant to say was that the 1.2GHz Snapdragon chips would be arriving in Q1. Whoops.
Now every man and his donkey has a Snapdragon chip in their smartphones, it’s time for Qualcomm to look past the 1.2GHz speeds and bring us a 1.5GHz dual-core. It’s on its way, from late this year/early next year.
For all those of you who read Kat’s glowing review of the formerly UK/Australia-only HTC Desire and lamented the fact that you couldn’t get your American paws on one, rejoice! The HTC Desire is coming to America starting this August through “select regional operators”. More details to come, but rest assured, it’ll have the 1GHz Snapdragon processor and HTC Sense UI that made the original so desirous.
It’s become de rigeur for manufacturers to whack a Snapdragon processor in smartphones nowadays – even if people don’t quite understand what it means (or does), they want nothing less. Now, Qualcomm’s offering dual-core 1.2GHz chips to manufacturers.
Who remembers their first smartphone? For me, it was an iMate running Windows Mobile and my main memory of it was that it was slow. While it did everything it was designed to do, like give me access to my calendar, make calls, play the odd game of Bubbles and run a few basic apps it was horribly slow. Well, time has marched on and we’re now on the brink of another improvement as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform is ready for the world.
