With all of the Windows 8 announcements earlier today, other companies are trying to ride the coattails of Microsoft"s two presentations on Wednesday (at the D9 Conference and at Computex). Late on Wednesday, mobile processor maker Qualcomm officially announced that its Snapdragon line of processors will also support Windows 8 when it is released. That includes the MSM8960 Snapdragon processor that comes with an intergrated 3G/LTE modem for smartphones. That processor is scheduled to start its sampling stage later this month.
It"s not much of a shock to learn that Snapdragon will be running Windows 8 since Microsoft had already announced months ago that Windows 8 will be running on ARM-based processors. While Qualcomm"s Snapdragon processors are their own design, they are based on the ARM v7 instruction set. In addition to the Snapdragon MSN8960 processor, Windows will also run on Qualcomm"s upcoming quad-core APQ8064 processor. Qualcomm says that product will start sampling in early 2012.
Luis Pineda, the senior vice president of product management, computing and consumer products at Qualcomm, is quoted in the press release as saying, "Our upcoming family of Snapdragon processors is intelligently integrated, optimized for mobile and built smarter, making it the ideal processor to address consumers’ growing demands for new, innovative experiences and usage scenarios that we believe will be delivered by the next version of Windows.”
While Microsoft is staying mum, officially at least, on when Windows 8 will officially launch, it is currently expected to be made available to consumers sometime in 2012.