Getting aggressive
Mobile chip giant Qualcomm has kept pretty quiet about the roadmap for its flagship Snadragon family of application processors since it announced the next batch at MWC. Luckily mobiletechworld has once more got its hands on what appears to be an internal Qualcomm presentation, which offers an update on what we already knew.
Surprisingly little has changed since February, but if this leak is legit it does confirm that Qualcomm has become more aggressive about its launches. At MWC Qualcomm was talking up its new Krait core, which will replace replace the Scorpion CPU found in all Snapdragons to date. We were told the first Krait Snapdragon would be the MSM8960, which began sampling in Q2 of this year, but which Qualcomm expected to first appear in devices in the first half of 2012.
But according to this leak the 8960 is now due to appear in Q4 of this year - several months earlier than expected. Other new details include a clock speed range of 1.5-1.7 GHz and a new graphics core called the Adreno 225 (as opposed to the Adreno 220, as previously announced), which can play back 1080p video at 30FPS.
The MSM8930 was previously said to be sampling in early 2012, but now looks set to appear in devices by Q3 of next year, so it could be that Qualcomm has managed to shorten the amount of time its partners take to integrate its new chips into devices. We know Qualcomm is acutely aware of how aggressive NVIDIA is being with its plan to produce a new Tegra every year, and think it likely that's the main catalyst for this apparent acceleration.
The big change in this mid-range part is that it's now expected to be dual-core, rather than single core, clocking at 1-1.2 GHz. The Adreno 305 core has slightly lower performance than the 225.
Lastly there's the big daddy quad-core Snapdragon - the 8964. Qualcomm had previously announced the non-modem APQ8064, but the processor elements are pretty much the same. This is also supposedly sampling early next year, but won't make it onto the shelves until early 2013, according to this leak. Each core will clock up to 2.5 GHz, and the Adreno 320 can whack out 1080p video at 60FPS.
The original story had a link to download a PDF of the leaked presentation, but someone had persuaded the hosting site it would be best for all concerned if it was taken down by the time we got there.
