Just like NVIDIA announcing the brand new Tegra 4 chipset yesterday, Qualcomm will soon take center stage at CES 2013 to announce a range of new Snapdragon processors in a new range of families: the Snapdragon 200, Snapdragon 400, Snapdragon 600 and Snapdragon 800. Each of these new chipsets brings a swathe of speed improvements, most notably in the top two chips.
The Snapdragon 600 is a revamped version of the current Snapdragon S4 Pro, bringing a quad-core Krait 300 CPU (the S4 had a Krait 200 processor apparently) with speeds up to 1.9 GHz, plus an Adreno 320 GPU and LPDDR3 memory. Qualcomm says that this chip represents a 40% speed boost and lower power consumption compared to last generation, an already amazingly fast chip, with Snapdragon 600 chips to be available in Q2 2013.
The Snapdragon 800 is where things start to get exciting because Qualcomm has pulled out all the stops. New Krait 400 cores take the grunt of processing power (four of them) up to 2.3 GHz, plus a new Adreno 330 GPU and LPDDR3 memory. LTE is bumped to a faster Cat.4 (150 Mbps downlink), 802.11ac Wi-Fi is included, 4K video playback and recording is possible, and the maximum display output is bumped to 2560 x 2048.
Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon 800's CPU is 75% faster while again providing lower power consumption while the Adreno 330 GPU is 1.5x faster than the Adreno 320. Unfortunately not much is known about the other two chips at this stage (the 400 or 200), but the super-powered Snapdragon 800 is supposed to be released in the middle of the year.
To make things more exciting, Qualcomm has 50 different products in the pipeline that are using this new chip and we expect that a significant portion of these will be running either Windows RT or Windows Phone.
Expect everything here to be officially announced when Qualcomm's press conference begins at around 6:30 PM PT.
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