Qualcomm: Quad-Core Snapdragon Phones Not Before Q4

By Douglas Perry
published

Qualcomm will not be joining the parade of quad-core processor makers at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next week.

According to VP of product management Raj Talluri, there may be conceptual models - which would be in line with the company's February 2011 announcement that samples of 2.5 GHz APQ8064 quad-core chips will be available in early 2012, but the firm's focus will be on reduced power consumption for LTE phones.

Talluri said that the dual-core, 28 nm MSM8960 that was shown in prototype phones at MWC 2011, will debut in several production phones during MWC 2012. The 8960 will integrate the updated Adreno 225 GPU core and deliver much better battery life on 3G/LTE phones than previous processors due to the integrated LTE radio that takes advantage of resource sharing.

If Qualcomm can deliver on the promise, the 8960 chip could be a big deal for the industry as there may actually be an LTE phone that does not eat through an entire battery charge within a few hours. However, the lack of a quad-core chip on the high-end may divert the attention at MWC to Samsung and Nvidia, both of which will be showcasing new and production-ready flagship models. Talluri said that 8064-based phone will not be available until this fall.

Douglas Perry
8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • joytech22
    ZingamQuad core phones? Wow! Now Cameron could render Avatar 2 on his handy! Good! /sarcasm
    Fixed.

    I like the idea of a quad in a phone, but I like the idea of better optimizing Android to perform better on single-core SOC's in comparison to smashing specifications through the roof in order to get it running smoothly.

    ICS is quite a step in doing that, it's one of the smoothest experiences you can get.
    Also instead of doubling CPU performance and GPU performance, they could also work on battery life..
    You know.. Battery life?! I'm talking to you phone manufacturers. Motorola has the right idea with the Razr Maxx now what the hell are the rest of you guys doing?
    Reply
  • razor512
    modern mobile devices are significantly faster than very old computers (eg the early ones that came with windows 2000 installed)

    Why is it that on a faster device with faster storage and faster CPU (at least on paper for things like mflops) and faster RAM boot into an OS that is less functional, takes longer to boot, and uses more RAM at startup (hard drives from around the year 2000 did not run very fast)

    I feel that if you really want a well optimized OS, then limit developers to modern devices but are underclocked to 150MHz, and limited to 64MB RAM and have the nand deliberately poorly optimized to reduce the IOPS and throughput to that of a hard drive from around year 1999.

    If you limit the hardware then the developers will be forced to optimize the code to be lite on memory, CPU cycles, and IOPS.

    In taking a programming class as an elective and talking to the professor, it seems their goal is to teach you how to make working code and not code that works well, so students leaving college today will be likely to make applications that are significantly larger and more resource hungry than they need to be. (they basically rely on modern systems having significantly more processing power in all aspects to throw running inefficient code in a speedy manner)
    Reply
  • yjagota
    Seriously, I think we need technology like Hydrogen fuel cells in Terminator 3. Harddisks used to be the bottlenecks but flash based drives (SSDs etc) changed all that. Now the only technology which is becoming a serious bottleneck, and very fast, is battery tech.
    Reply
  • tomfreak
    and bring the dual core phones below $200, single core Android below $100, wooohoooo.

    Still waiting a smart phone costing below $100.
    Reply
  • kyuuketsuki
    I'm much more interested in the dual-core Krait than any of the quad-cores coming out.
    Reply
  • TheFoxyBox
    yjagotaSeriously, I think we need technology like Hydrogen fuel cells in Terminator 3. Harddisks used to be the bottlenecks but flash based drives (SSDs etc) changed all that. Now the only technology which is becoming a serious bottleneck, and very fast, is battery tech.I remember stumbling across this on Wikipedia once and while I don't know if it's already working or if it would work in a phone but it's some interesting tech:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanowire_battery
    Reply
  • eddieroolz
    I think the execs at NVidia just did a joy of dance at this announcement.
    Reply
  • impreza
    and so what 2.5ghz quad core just going to drain you battery twice as fast as any current dual core. 28nm dual core with new gpu will be plenty fast enough. It is still to early for quads to be useful in phones. single to dual has big advantages dual to quad is much less noticeable.
    Reply