Qualcomm: Snapdragon processor gaining traction

BY MIKE FREEMAN, UNION-TRIBUNE
Resourse: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/may/31/qualcomm-snapdragon-processor-gaining-traction/

Qualcomm said this week that its Snapdragon application processors are gaining traction with tablet and smartphone makers, with 125 announced devices either on the market or planned, and another 250 devices in development.

That’s up from the San Diego wireless giant’s previous market estimates for Snapdragon, which pegged penetration at 150 devices that were either launched or under development.

Snapdragon is Qualcomm mobile applications processor — the brains powering smartphones and tablets. It gives the company a bigger piece of the smartphone chip market beyond its core baseband modems to connecting the phone to wireless networks.

Qualcomm said its penetration has been especially good for tablet computers, with about 40 tablets in development using Snapdragon processors.

The company said Snapdragon is being used on multiple operating systems, including Android; Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which targets tablets; BlackBerry; Google’s Chrome; Hewlett-Packard’s webOS; Windows Phone 7 and the next version of Windows, which Microsoft has said is being tailored to work on processors based on ARM Holdings architecture. Qualcomm licenses the chip architecture for Snapdragon from ARM, then adds its own technology.

“We are very pleased with the tremendous Snapdragon traction we have been getting with a variety of companies,” said Luis Pineda, senior vice president of product management, computing and consumer products at Qualcomm.

At the Computex conference in Taipei, Qualcomm is showing off Snapdragon processors in devices from HTC, HP, ASUS and others.

In addition, Qualcomm new Atheros subsidiary, which it acquired last month for $3.1 billion, is unveiling a range of Wi-Fi chips the use both the 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz frequency bands, enabling consumers to access cleaner spectrum for more reliable wireless media streaming that requires interference-free bandwidth and minimal latency. Qualcomm Atheros also will be introducing power line and Ethernet connectivity chips.