The mobile industry is growing fast and smartphones are slowly dropping in price to make them more accessible. Qualcomm has released two new systemprocessors with two cores, that are backwards compatible with older units for making budget smartphones quickly and easily.
The systemprocessor (SoC) in a smartphone is often a relatively small part of the manufacturing cost of a smartphone, or fo that matter a tablet. The large cost is the development of new units, which means you try to keep models on the market for as long as possible. The budget segment is flowering with meager performance today, but this is something Qualcomm intends to remedy.
Qualcomm has introduced two new systemprocessors in the Snapdragon S4 series; MSM8625 and MSM8225. Both sport two “Snapdragon” cores clocked up to 1 GHz, has Adreon 203 graphics and integrated 3G modem. The specifications may not sound all that exciting, but it is the backwards compatibility that is suppose to excite. in practice this means the manufacturers can take an existing design, add some new functions and the new systemprocessors can bring a new product to market in record time.
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Thw new systemprocessors are 100 percent comaptible with the older MSM7x27A and MSM7x25A models, in both hardware and software. This can be compared to socket compatibility among computers. Essentially this means companies can build new, faster smartphones using an existing design and release it to market quickly. MSM7225 and MSM7227 comes with an ARM11 cores at 518 and 600 MHz respectively and Adreno 200 graphics, completing the upgrade ladder for Qualcomm.
“This allows device manufacturers to focus their engineering resources on developing value-added features that will help make their high-volume smartphone stand out from the competition. The QRD ecosystem program is designed to help device manufacturers developing products for regions whose networks are evolving from 2G to 3G and high volume smartphones are becoming increasingly popular.”
Qualcomm has also released the third generation QRD (Qualcomm Reference Design), which is a tool package for manufacturers. QRD makes the development of new products faster and cheaper, thanks to a large number of pretested circuits from Qualcomm. The two new systemprocessors comes to great news in developing countries, while in the West mainly be used to power cheaper smartphones.
