Tuesday night Qualcomm announced the addition of two quad-core SoC's to its line of Snapdragon S4 mobile processors, the MSM8226 and MSM8626 chipsets. The company said these new SoCs will bring premium multimedia and connectivity features to high-volume 3G handsets. Packed with the Adreno 305 GPU, they will support 1080p capture and playback, up to a 13MP camera, and an extremely long battery life.
Qualcomm said the new quad-core chips will be fabricated using the 28-nm technology node. They will also incorporate the new WTR2605 multi-mode radio transceiver which is optimized for for TD-SCDMA, CDMA 1xAdv and HSPA+ networks, and feature an integrated, high-performance GPS core with GLONASS and Beidou support.
The new quad-core chips will still continue to support multi-SIM capabilities with Dual SIM, Dual Standby; and Dual SIM, Dual Active, the company said. They will also be optimized for low power consumption, offering a 40-percent power savings and a 60-percent smaller footprint compared to the previous generation.
"The expansion of our Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 family extends our leadership in performance and low power for the high-volume smartphones," said Cristiano Amon, executive vice president and co-president of mobile and computing products, Qualcomm Technologies. "This expanded roadmap provides our customers with a differentiated feature set upon which to build compelling smartphones for budget-conscious consumers."
In addition to the two new quad-core chips, Qualcomm will also release Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD) versions of both MSM8226 and MSM8626 processors. This "QRD" program grants device manufacturers access to development resources, and an ecosystem of hardware and software vendors whose components and applications have been tested and approved for QRD-based devices.
"QRD customers are offered everything they need to rapidly deliver differentiated smartphones to the mass market," the company said. "There have been more than 100 public QRD-based product launches to date in collaboration with more than 40 OEMs, and there are currently more than 100 designs in progress."
The QRD versions of the QRD8226 and QRD8626 quad-core SoCs will be available for sampling by the second quarter of 2013. The non-QRD versions will be ready for customer sampling also by the second quarter of 2013 for UMTS, CDMA and TD-SCDMA networks.
