The mighty dragon is getting a boost, a huge boost actually, as mobile chip giant Qualcomm has announced at MWC’11 an update for their famous Snapdragon ARM processor. Nvidia has announced Kal-El, their quad-core ready Tegra processor, and Qualcomm doesn’t seem to want to lose in this race.

Codenamed as Krait, it will be available in single, dual and quad-core configurations, and ready for mass production towards the end of the year. It seemed that industrial players are getting too hyped up about Moore’s Law. We’ve just getting warm and friendly with dual-core mobile processors and the industry is already coming out with quad-core chips. Hertz is no longer the e-penis here, as the count of cores is more important.

Now, what’s staggering here is that, according to the company, the new chip offers an insane amount of horsepower with speeds up to 2.5GHz per core in its CPU. This will together with a new Adreno GPU series that offer up to four 3D cores. Madness? Yes. Not only is it having four-packs, has it also had fast legs.

Apart from that, the new chip will also come with quite a number of built-in features such as WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and FM connectivity; support for near field communication (NFC) and stereoscopic 3D for both video/picture capture and playback. Not to forget, the chip also comes with multi-mode LTE modem.

The dual-core version of the chip – MSM8960 – is expected to be available for manufacturers in Q2 2011; while the single-core MSM8930 and quad-core APQ8064 are scheduled for early 2012 release. It is going to take a while before consumers can actually see products based on them, so you have to hold your horses for the time being. For now, let’s chill out with some dual-core smartphones.

SOURCE via Qualcomm