14 DAY TRIAL // Qualcomm, one of the main suppliers of ARM chips for smartphones and tablets, is implied to be having some issues that forced it to delay the launch of some upcoming products.
Like all IT companies, Qualcomm has a product roadmap it tries to stick to as best as it can, but there seem to be difficulties with this goal at the moment.
According to circumstances that were not disclosed, the company has decided to postpone the launch of several system-on-chip devices.
That is not to say that the company is suffering setbacks, not exactly.
According to what the report says, this looks more like a change of product launch order than anything else.
The platforms scheduled for launch this year (2012) haven't been affected much, if at all, and some new ones, for the entry-level market, have been added as well.
The MSM8625 and MSM8225, with and without CDMA support, are just two examples. They will replace the ARM Cortex A5-based MSM7625A/7225A and will have two cores instead of one, at 1 GHz (L2 cache memory is 512 KB).
There will also be the Adreno 203 GPU (graphics processing unit), about twice as strong as the Adreno 200 of the MSM7x25A (the two chips above will replace it).
The SoCs that were pushed back are high-end parts like the quad-core MSM8974 and APQ8094, as well as the mid-range APQ8074.
For those who don't know, they are the first Qualcomm parts that operate at a frequency of more than 2 GHz.
The delay might have to do with the change to the foundry technology process used in the creation of the Snapdragons.
While there aren't any yield problems, the timetables for advancing from a node to another, as well as the different resources that have to be allocated for each SoC, could have gone through some modifications.
Either way, Qualcomm's strongest upcoming SoCs won't show up before the second quarter of 2013 at this point.