With everyon focusing on Tegra 2 tablets and smartphones we have to ask our selves what’s beeing going on with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. They’ve been pretty quite the past few weeks with nvidia hoging the stage with product releases. It appears that Qualcomm wants to remind us that they too are rolling out on a variety of devices and plastforms.
If you want to spec out on their latest stack the first MSM8x60 chips will be set at 1.2 GHz, but they can be clocked all the way up to 1.5 GHz. Also included is Qualcomm’s new Adreno 220 GPU, which can process 88 million triangles per second and offers “twice the processing power of its predecessor.”
Qualcomm is still using their custom 45nm Scorpion core as found in the second-gen Snapdragon, but the third generation model includes double the L2 cache, 512 KB vs 256 KB. By comparison, the OMAP4 and Tegra 2 have 1 MB L2 cache and the upcoming (2012) OMAP5
has 2 MB.
The other major difference with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform is that they include an integrated 3G modem. The MSM8260 includes single mode support for HSPA+ networks (up to 14 Mbps downloads and 5.6 Mbps uploads), while the MSM8660 includes dual mode support for HSPA+ networks (up to 14.4 Mbps downloads and 5.76 Mbps) and CDMA2000 1X , 1xEV-DO Rel A/B.
Raj Talluri, VP of Product Management, explains the Snapdragon game developers ecosystem in their latest video showing off Snapdragon & Adreno.
