MWC: Qualcomm revs up Snapdragon

BARCELONA – This year’s Mobile World Congress has become the venue for mobile silicon vendors to announce their super chips. Following last week’s unveiling of Texas Instruments’(NYSE:TXN) new OMAP 5 mobile applications processor, Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) revealed today that it is redesigning the CPU core of its own Snapdragon processor line, and is implementing in some pretty hefty configurations. Even Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) got in the game, announcing a partnership with Amtel to build a reference design for next-generation mobile Internet devices using Nvidia’s Tegra 2 platform.

Qualcomm, however, took the prize for developing the most outsized processor. It announced first of all that it has completed work on the next-generation core to replace is Scorpion CPU. Called Krait—a poisonous Indian snake, to keep with the nasty critters theme—the core can scale to 2.5 GHz, but using a 28 nanometer process, consumes 65% less power than previous designs. But while its competitors are implementing their new processors in dual-core designs, Qualcomm is pulling a move reminiscent of the Schick-Gillette razor wars of the last decade. It’s implementing Krait in a quad-core designed to power the most sophisticated future smartphones and tablets, said Raj Talluri, vice president of product management for Qualcomm CDMA Techologies’ Applications Processors division.

Unlike many of its competitors using ARM processors, Qualcomm doesn’t license ARM cores. Rather its licenses the ARM instruction set to develop its own processors, hence the Scorpion and Krait names. Talluri said the closest equivalent would be the ARM 15 core, which forms the heart of TI’s new dual-core OMAP 5. Talluri said Qualcomm believes the internal core development is the key to its recent success in the application processor market since it allows Qualcomm to fine-tune it’s the heart of its silicon for the smartphone’s high-performance, low-power requirements. On the lower end of the Snapdragon line it uses the standard ARM reference designs.

“ARM licenses to wide variety of suppliers,” Talluri said. “We just optimize for mobile, designing for low-power handsets.”

Qualcomm will be implementing Krait in single-and dual-core designs as well as in the four-core configuration, Talluri said. The platform will start sampling this summer and will be embedded in the first commercial devices in 2012.

Qualcomm also announced its first radio chipset that will support future multi-carrier features in high-speed packet access plus (HSPA+), enabling network speeds as high as 84 Mb/s. The channel stacking technology allows operators to bind together multiple HSPA+ carriers into a single massive pipe, even if the carriers are in different frequency bands. T-Mobile (NYSE:DT) is deploying dual-carrier HSPA+ this year and exploring using part of its PCS spectrum to create even bigger bandwidths. Qualcomm said it is working closely with T-Mobile on the project.