New Snapdragon heralds start of "smartbook" era

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 1 Jun 2009 at 12:17

Qualcomm has announced the next generation of its Atom-rivalling Snapdragon platform, featuring a 30% improvement in battery life.

The company claims the new platform will give rise to yet another class of mini-laptop, called "smartbooks".

The next-generation Snapdragon will run at 1.3Ghz, as opposed to the 1Ghz of the current platform, and use the 45nm manufacturing process, reducing power consumption by a third. The company claims the 1.3GHz QSD8650A chipset will use only 10 milliwatts in standby.

Beyond the impressive speed and battery improvements, the new chip will also feature enhanced 3D acceleration, high-definition video playback, GPS and support for the Bluetooth 2.1 standard.

The manufacturer claims it has 30 companies in line to build devices based on the new Snapdragon - the current generation of which is powering Toshiba's TG01 smartphone. Among the major names is Asus, which has been demonstrating a fanless Eee PC running on Snapdragon at the Computex show in Taiwan.

Qualcomm is dubbing devices based on the chipset "smartbooks" in an attempt to differentiate them from netbooks, which are almost synonymous with Intel's Atom processor. A smartbook, by Qualcomm's definition, features an ARM-based processor, a Linux OS and 3G connectivity.

Devices based on the new Snapdragon should appear in early 2010.