Short of looking into a crystal ball, it’s a crap shoot trying to guess the future of mobile technology — that is unless you’ve been given access to Qualcomm’s presentation. It just so happens our friends at Electronista happened to come across a set of slides from such a presentation, outlining the entire 2011 and 2012 Snapdragon roadmap. Ready to meet the processors powering your future smartphones?
There’s four Snapdragon processors in the fold for Qualcomm for the remainder of 2011 and 2012: the MSM8270, MSM8930, MSM8960 and APQ8064. Since we trim the fat at Electricpig, let’s jump straight to the highlights. All chips are based on Krait architecture with up to five times the raw CPU processing power of current Snapdragon chips and four times faster graphics. These graphics will provide “console quality gaming”.
What does this mean in the real world? Put simply, Qualcomm explicitly mentioned these chips will beat the ARM Cortex-A9 as well as the future Cortex-A15. Krait architecture is built on a 28 nm process, offering up to 23 percent more computing headroom than the A15 while using 47 percent less power. In terms of actual clock speed, like the upcoming ARM chips, the four Qualcomm chips will be offered in single to quad-core models up to 2.5 GHz.
Expect to see tablets and phones using the MSM8270, MSM8930, MSM8960 and APQ8064 in 2012. The remainder of 2011 will likely be used to work out the kinks, conduct testing and line up some handset manufacturers.
via Electronista
