Just after the news about MediaTek prepping its entry level quad-core chips, the largest SoC maker in the world Qualcomm announced its new entry level quad-core entries into the ever competitive SoC market. And these new chips are added to the Snapdragon S4 play family of SoCs. The specs race gets way interesting after this announcement.
The Snapdragon S4 play chips are essentially aimed at the entry level smartphone market. For example, the successor to devices like Xperia tipo might run this new chip from Qualcomm. The new processors are codenamed MSM8225Q and MSM8625Q. These are basically the souped up versions of the earlier dual core Snapdragon S4 play chips – MSM8225 and MSM8625.
The highlights of the new chips are –
- Support for 720p displays and 720p video encode/decode(recording/playback)
- Integrated multimode UMTS/CDMA modem for MSM8625Q and just UMTS for MSM8225Q
- Integrated WiFi, BT 4.0 and FM connectivity
- Supports LPDDR2 memory
- Availability starting Q1 2013 on commercial devices
This Snapdragon S4 Play and Plus processors designed to let the device manufacturers seamlessly migrate existing Snapdragon S1-based designs to S4 quad-core CPU-based designs. Completely impressed by the specs these two chips are toting. I sincerely hope that the real world performance lives up to the on-paper awesomeness.
On a side note, Qualcomm has also launched a new S4 Plus chip – MSM8x30 that adds support for all the three China operators including those who support the LTE-TDD/TD-SCDMA technology.