From EETimes: Qualcomm kicked off the next round of competition in smartphones with its announcement of high-end and midrange LTE chips last week. Broadcom, Mediatek, and others are expected to join the 4G handset battle in 2014.
Qualcomm's 28 nm Snapdragon 410, announced Dec. 9, will pack a multimode LTE baseband along with a 64-bit core, an upgraded Adreno 306 GPU, and support for 1080-progressive video playback and a 13 megapixel camera.
Perhaps even more significantly, the company said it intends to make LTE available across all of the Snapdragon products, gunning for midrange handsets around the globe, including China, which approved plans for its 4G networks last week.
“We are excited to bring 4G LTE to highly affordable smartphones at a sub $150 price point with the introduction of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor,” said Jeff Lorbeck, senior vice president and chief operating officer, Qualcomm Technologies, China.
The new Snapdragon chips are expected to sample in early 2014 and appear in commercial devices by the second half of the year. They will go up against offerings in the works at Broadcom, Mediatek, and other vendors struggling for a stake in an expanding market for 4G handsets.
"The takeup of LTE is going much faster than anyone anticipated, where every country now is getting serious about it. It’s no longer just a very high-end superphone; you’re seeing LTE come down into more mainstream models," Broadcom CTO Henry Samueli told EE Times. "We bought Renesas Mobile… so that helped us take the next step in getting a very mature LTE modem technology that Nokia has been working on for a decade."
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