Marvell announced their upcoming SoC that has 3 cores, 2 for high performance and 1.5 Ghz each, and one that has much lower clock frequency, and is used for low performance tasks.
Another surprise is that their CPU will be paired with a GPU that goes to 200 million triangles, which is more than double of what Hummingbird’s GPU can show for itself with 90 million triangles.
All these specs sound great, but let’s not forget that it takes at least a year to see chips in products after they’ve been announced, which means that it might show up after Samsung Orion and Tegra 3 are released. And it might even prove to be weaker than them by then.
Samsung Orion GPU promises 5x the performance of Hummingbird’s GPU and Tegra 3 should be at least as good as Orion, so we’ll see next year which one is the winner.
I can say right now that 2011 is going to be a battle of GPU’s not CPU’s, which will leave Qualcomm’s Snapdragon lagging behind the others, especially since they won’t even have a Cortex A9 CPU next year. Even if they match the performance their chips will probably use more power because Cortex A9 should be more efficient, and also Snapdragon will use higher clock rates which implies more heat and bigger battery drain.