Qualcomm has become one of the fastest growing semiconductor market companies. Consolidating the success, the company has recently introduced two new processor series, Snapdragon S4 - MSM8226 and MSM8626, aimed at mass market smartphones next year.
The two new items - a 28-nm solutions, which means reduced consumption and increased productivity. In an official document, there is no information about the performance boost of new Snapdragon S4. According to previous information, the new 11-stage pipeline with the ability to perform three instructions per clock will 60 -% increase in performance compared to today's core Qualcomm. In this case, the processors have four cores (Krait, class Cortex-A9) and GPU Adreno 305 (unified shader architecture, support for Direct3D, OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenVG 1.1, EGL 1.4, Direct3D Mobile, SVGT 1.2). Processors allow to play video with 1080p quality and work with a 13-megapixel camera.
The composition of new solutions include multi-mode radio module WTR2605, including optimized to work with the Chinese standards such as TD-SCDMA, CDMA 1xAdv and HSPA +. WTR2605 also supports GPS, GLONASS, and Beidou (Chinese GPS).
The company expects to organize shipping samples of new products until the second quarter 2013. Based devices promise to appear in the second half next year. Beginning in December this year, the company is ready to meet any demand for the 28-nm solutions.
Much hope, Qualcomm imposes on its Chinese development center reference design mobile platforms - Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD). This center allows quickly to bring new devices - no longer than 60 days. This requires a lot of effort.