14 DAY TRIAL // For the most part of this year, Qualcomm has been very busy looking for foundries to manufacture its latest ARM power-efficient mobile processors. TMSC’s production facilities were simply not enough to satisfy the demand for the Snapdragon S4 family of chips, so the American fabless chip designer has additionally secured UMC and Samsung manufacturing contracts.
Most of our readers are familiar with ARM’s Cortex A15 stunning performance, but it seems that Qualcomm is dead-set on conquering the entire market for mobile and power-efficient processors.
To achieve this, Qualcomm designed different iterations of its “Krait” ARM CortexA15 to make sure it had the perfect solution for each market segment.
The company’s most powerful Snapdragon S4 processor is the quad-core APQ 8064 chip running at 1.5GHz with Adreno 320 graphics.
Although the chip can be clocked higher than 2 GHz, the standard 1.5 GHz version was demonstrated by Raj Talluri, Qualcomm’s SVP Product Management at the company’s UPLINQ 2012 event we already reported about here.
The demonstration shows the CPU is capable to fluently render and switch between 6 different FullHD videos, and the power requirements are so modest that the phone can be "charged" by insects.