Qualcomm reveals its new chip is nearly netbook ready

EVERYONE WANTS IN on the netbook scene right now, and none more so than Qualcomm, which has just spent about four years and $350 million, designing a new chip for crotchtops and handhelds based on the Snapdragon processor.

Qualcomm's prototype offering, which should make its debut next year, is apparently a netbook with a difference, and one which will offer a little something different from Intel's highly popular Atom.

"We believe there are limitations in the [Intel] architecture," Manjit Gill, director of product management at Qualcomm's Connected and Consumer Products Group, told Cnet, explaining his belief that the market currently valued connectivity more than processing power.

"Our vision is that [the device is] always connected. Even when you shut it down, it's still 'on'," said Gill, describing how the ideal would be for the netbook to tap into a user's Exchange server, retrieve e-mail, bung it on the drive, and be there ready and waiting whenever the user flipped it open.

This 'always on' connectivity is something Intel's Atom can't currently achieve and which would sap the battery juice rapidly. But that's not to say Atom would necessarily be displaced, it just depends on the users' priorities. The Atom, despite having little integration, is much faster than Snapdragon in terms of real-world performance, for instance.

And rather than go straight for Intel's jugular, Qualcomm seems to have set itself a more realistic adversary to begin with, namely British based ARM. ARM processors are pretty common in most mobiles and mobile Internet devices (MIDs) today, which is probably why Qualcomm decided they would be a good model to imitate.

After acquiring an architecture license from ARM, Qualcomm apparently locked about 50 CPU designers in a room with $350 million for four years and told them to improve on it.

The result seems to be the Qualcomm QSD8672 dual-core Snapdragon, boasting two CPUs capable of 1.5GHz performance, HSPA+, up to 28Mbps download speeds, 1080p high-definition video, Wi-Fi, mobile TV and GPS. In its prototype, Qualcomm is also using ATI's tech for its netbook's graphics core.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will purportedly be building the 45-nanometer processor and according to Qualcomm, Acer, Asus, and Toshiba have all already said they're planning devices based on Snapdragon. µ

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