ARM processors are on everyone lips nowadays and the perhaps best known of the current generation is Qualcomm Snapdragon. The company has revealed that the first products with a dual-core 1.2 GHz Snapdragon CPU will hit the market in Q1 2011.
Qualcomm announced, by mistake, that the high-end model at 1.5 GHz will appear earlier next year, but this has now been denied since this CPU isn’t slated to appear until the end of next year.
Qualcomm MSM8260 and MSM8660 with clock frequencies of 1,2 GHz will be more than efficient for most smartphones and will offer playback of 1080p video and 3D and 2D acceleration through Open GLES 2.0 and Open VG 1.1.
How it measures up to the new generation of Cortex A9 SoCs from NVIDIA, Samsung and Texas Instruments is also important. Current Snapdragon circuits can’t quite measure up in graphical applications, something that will be prioritized now that both NVIDIA and Samsung have raised the bar with their next generation chips.
The new generation of Snapdragon circuits is said to house a new Adreno 205 GPU that will be considerably more powerful than the current Adreno 200 GPU, but on par with PowerVR SGX540 that is used by Samsung Hummingbird. A GPU that Samsung trumps five times over with its new Orion circuit.
Qualcomm has not confirmed which graphics circuit that is used by the new 1.2 GHz Snapdragon circuit, but it will need something a lot better to keep up in 2011.
