Qualcomm, which happens to possess a market share of 66 percent, is aiming to further tighten its grip in the global cellular baseband processor market.
A leak of its chipset roadmap suggests that its future flagship chipset, allegedly named Snapdragon 820, will possess two features: one is 14 nm FinFet process; and two is its Taipan architecture rather than the usual Krait processors found on high performing SoCs.
While Krait processors are no strangers to jaw-dropping processing power and energy efficiency, they would still be lacking the punch that the company's alleged future Taipan processors would bring. The Snapdragon 820, according to leaked document, will possess eight TS2 high-performance cores, along with company's new Adreno 530 GPU, and faster LPDDR4 RAM. The roadmap also states that the assimilated connectivity chip will be an advanced MDM9X55 LTE-A Cat 10 modem, capable of better connectivity performance compared to the company's previous generation Cat 10 LTE modems.
In addition to the Snapdragon 820, the roadmap also provided an outline for the lower performing chipsets, which includes the Snapdragon 815, 629, 625, 620 and 616. The Snapdragon 815 will also feature an octa-core processor while the Snapdragon 629 and 625 will feature hexa-core processors, followed by the entry level chipsets, the Snapdragon 620 and 616, which will possess quad-core processors. Unlike the Snapdragon 820, the 625, 629 and 815 chips will be processed on the 20 nm node, but all of them will possess processors that will be compatible with the 64-bit architecture.
While the company has not commented on when smartphones, tablets and other devices will feature these next generation chipsets, there are rumors that the new chips will be unveiled during the second quarter of 2015. Devices possessing Qualcomm's new offerings will most likely be showcased during the 3rd quarter of the same year.
However, there is no confirmation from Qualcomm about the accuracy of this leaked information, thus it must be taken with a grain of salt.
