Qualcomm on Tuesday introduced two new system-on-chips designed for mass high-performance smartphones and media tablets. The new processors pack four high-end Krait cores as well as Adreno 305 advanced graphics processor. With the announcement, Qualcomm improves its competitive positions against Nvidia Corp., which has been selling high-end Tegra 3 application processors for about a year.

Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8226 and MSM8626 feature with four Qualcomm Krait (Cortex-A9-like with 3 decoders, 11 stage pipeline, VFPv4 FPU, 128-bit NEON accelerator, L2 2MB cache [512KB per core]), powerful Adreno 305 graphics processing unit (unified shader architecture; supports Direct3D 11 feature level 9_3, OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenVG 1.1, EGL 1.4, Direct3D Mobile, SVGT 1.2). The chip fully supports 1080p capture and playback, and up to a 13MP camera. The new chips are made using 28nm process technology.

In addition to quad-core CPU processing power, these chips incorporate the new WTR2605 multi-mode radio transceiver, optimized to address China specific requirements such as support for TD-SCDMA, CDMA 1xAdv and HSPA+. The WTR2605 transceiver comes with an integrated, high-performance GPS core with GLONASS and Beidou support. Optimized for low power consumption, the WTR2605 transceiver offers 40% power savings and 60% smaller footprint compared to previous generations.

“The expansion of our Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 family extends our leadership in performance and low power for the high-volume smartphones. This expanded roadmap provides our customers with a differentiated feature set upon which to build compelling smartphones for budget-conscious consumers,” said Cristiano Amon, executive vice president and co-president of mobile and computing products, Qualcomm Technologies.

Both processors will be ready for customer sampling by the second quarter of 2013 for UMTS, CDMA and TD-SCDMA.

Tags: Qualcomm, Krait, Adreno, Snapdragon, 28nm