Snapdragon
The QCT has traditionally concerned itself with providing chipsets for mobile phones, but recently it has diversified into providing 3G communications modules for embedding into notebooks (Gobi) and chipsets that provide complete processing and communications functionalities (Snapdragon), which Qualcomm hopes will inspire a new class of device called the smartbook.
"The place that we've come from is feature phones - we've been delivering chips that support modem and other functionalities in that phone," said Timmons. "As the smartphone segment has developed, we have very successfully integrated the kind of external applications processor that has traditionally been used to power a smartphone into our core chip platform.
"Smartphone chips, rather than having the single ARM processor that traditional mobile phones had, have two - one for the communications functionality and one for the operating system.
"With our Snapdragon chipset, we've taken a step beyond that. We keep the core ARM processor that we use for modem functionality, but we integrate another new processor of our own design called Scorpion. This is still based on the ARM instruction set and firmly within the ARM ecosystem, but that is able to deliver the kind of processing functionality that you would get in a mainstream netbook, or even notebook chip."
"This means that rather than taking a PC processor and then adding connectivity in, you get communications and processing in a single chip with Snapdragon."
