Qualcomm aims for Intel's place on the market for ultramobile PCs

Sep 6, 2007 14:10 GMT  ·  By

The mobile computing market is on a growing trend despite an almost chronic shortage of important hardware parts, so a number of companies are trying to force their way into this market at the expence of already established manufacturers. This is the case of the Qualcomm company that aims at taking Intel's place on the ultra mobile computer systems market using a new low power processor.

The manufacturing company, Qualcomm, already started to ship the new breed of chip packages named SnapDragon to a host of mobile devices producers in an attempt to popularize its design and increase the number of adopting systems. The SnapDragon chip package features a low power processor named Scorpion which, according to the chief executive officer from Qualcomm, Paul Jacobs, will enable the mobile industry to manufacture a whole new line of ultra mobile computers and other mobile devices.

On the hardware department, the Scorpion processors are using a quite high running frequency of 1GB while needing only a trickle of power to function, between 250 milliwatts and 500 milliwatts, while on the other side Intel's lowest consuming processor for the ultra mobile market segment, the A110 runs at 800MHz and needs around 3W of power. Apart from the Scorpion processor the SnapDragon chip package comes with an integrated 600MHz digital signal processor while implementing a mobile broadband connectivity solution including support for CDMA2000 (Code Division Multiple Access 2000), 1xEVDO (Evolution-Data Only), HSDPA/HSUPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access/High Speed Uplink Packet Access), as well as mobile TV, Bluetooth, GPS (Global Positioning System) and WLAN (wireless-LAN), according to the news site infoworld. The Qualcomm company aims for Intel's place on the mobile market while claiming that their mobile processor poses a series of important advantages over the Intel made solutions but as the Scorpion is an Arm based CPU with a different set of hardware level instructions which are optimized for huge power saving but lack support for the most important thing, software applications, the company's success may very well be limited to a niche market.

Even if Intel's ultra mobile computing solutions, the 800MHz A110 and the 600MHz A100, consume comparatively a lot of power, they are fully compatible with the base x86 hardware instruction set so in theory they could run just about any application written for a PC, unlike the Scorpion processor which may have trouble with compatibility. The move from Qualcomm comes just after another company, VIA Technologies, recently announced a new low power x86 compatible processor which runs at 500MHz and consumes up to a maximum of 1 watt, or 0.1 watts in idle mode while the Eden ULV, the faster version from VIA needs a maximum of 3.5W.