Qulcomm today showed their roadmap for the Qualcomm family of chipsets. They also said that they are getting ready a dual core chipset that offers five times the performance of their first Snapdragon and four times the graphics performance upgrade, but they don’t mention whether it’s compared to the Adreno 2xx family or the older Adreno 130. The chipset will also supposedly come with a power draw that is 75% less than the first Snapdragon.
I find all this information a bit misleading. First of all I think they mean that this chip’s power draw is 75% less “per core” than the first Snapdragon. So one of these cores would use 75% less power than the first Snapdragon, which makes sense because this chip is manufactured at 28 nm while first Snapdragon was manufactured at 65 nm. Together these cores would not have -75% power draw, but more like -50%. Of course that’s still great. Even if it uses the same power it would still be a great achievement to use a dual core at the same power draw as a single core. I just don’t like that they are being misleading and trying to inflate their numbers.
They don’t even say exactly compared to which GPU is Adreno 3xx four times better? I think Qualcomm will continue to produce subpar GPUs compared to Tegra and PowerVR SGX GPUs, which is too bad because in 2011 the GPU will be a lot more important than it was in 2010. They’ll be needed to power HD+ display resolutions, along with giving hardware acceleration for Android’s UI and also hardware acceleration for Flash and soon the mobile browser as well (the type IE9, FF4 and Chrome 9 are getting). Also the new GPUs in 2011 will bring support for OpenCL and general computing, which will make GPUs ever more important in a mobile device to give extra performance alongside the CPU.
I think by the time this Qualcomm chipset will be out, Tegra 2 and Samsung’s Orion should be out or around the corner as well, and I’d rather take a look at dual core phones with those.