Broadcom’s New Chip To Rival Qualcomm’s SnapDragon And Make Phones Cheaper
February 12 2010 Categorized Under: Cell Phones Tags; ARM11, Broadcom, qualcomm, snapdragon, SoC No Commented
Mobile phones are fast becoming the mini personal computers that people have always wanted t carry around. Of course, I am not discounting the iPad here but the new-age smartphones have really changed the way we access and process while on the move. A large part of this has been made possible by really powerful mobile processors. Unlike desktop processors, mobile processors need to stay power-efficient before they increase processing power. So the 1Ghz chip from Qualcomm really made waves and gave birth to a whole new line of phones. Broadcom sees Qualcomm SnapDragon’s processing power and answers it with both speed and price economy.
Broadcom has this new chip that the company claims will be able to match SnapDragon’s processing power and still lower the overall cost of phones in the future. This chip integrates the processor, the radio transceiver and also Open GL 2.0. This chip uses a new 65nm process and is a HSUPA. It integrates an ARM11 and is called the BCM21553 HSUPA baseband processor.
Broadcom claims that it is capable of 5.8Mbps upstream data transfer and 7.2Mbps downstream. Power consumption is also apparently down, video support upto HVGA quality and it can handle an 8 Megapixel camera. It can also apparently decode H.264 video at 30fps.
According to the chip-makers, these new products will enable mobile handset manufacturers to make faster, more powerful and also cheaper handsets. The current crop of SnapDragon phones are extremely pricey. So if Broadcom can actually bring the prices down on high-specced phones, they might have something there.
