New Snapdragon Chip With Integrated LTE Will Save Your Battery [Guts]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5887205/new-snapdragon-chip-with-integrated-lte-will-save-your-battery

Qualcomm's next-generation system-on-a-chip is set to turn up inside consumer devices at the Mobile World Congress—and judging by its rumored speed and integrated LTE technology, it could cause quite a stir.

Qualcomm has announced that the new chip—MSM8960, or Snapdragon S4 to its friends—will debut in several handsets next week in Barcelona. Whilst only dual-core, the exciting news is that Qualcomm has been able to roll LTE connectivity into the chip.

Currently, phones have a separate LTE processor that both adds bulk and kills battery performance. An integrated system should help alleviate those issues by sharing resources.

AnandTech has also had an opportunity to benchmark the new processor, and the results look promising, with the chip trumping the highest results from any currently shipping devices by a factor of two. In real-world tests, they found that compared to a Galaxy Nexus, the Snapdragon S4 helped reduce web page loading times by 0.3 seconds with the cache disabled or 1.4 seconds with it turned on. That is massive.

Qualcomm is planning to launch a quad-core version of the processor too, which should be interesting. [GigaOm and Anandtech via The Verge]