What little word there was about Qualcomm’s S4 class of chipsets has been keeping spec nerds on the edge of their collective seats, and now the company is ready to announce a handful of new additions to their vaunted S4 lineup.
Here’s a quick recap for those of you who don’t have a degree in Qualcommology: the company recently revamped the Snapdragon brand to include performance tiers, and the S4 tier is where they keep all the really good stuff. The APQ8064, for example, was one of the first S4 chipsets Qualcomm announced and its processor’s four cores run at a blistering 2.5Ghz. So yeah, expect just a little craziness when Qualcomm slaps an S4 sticker on something.
Qualcomm has pulled the curtains back on three of their S4 processors in the past (the MSM8960, MSM8930 and the aforementioned APQ8064), but eight new chipsets take the stage today. They are, in no particular order, the MSM8660A, the MSM8260A, the MSM8630, the MSM8230, the MSM8627, the MSM8227, the APQ8060A and the APQ8030.
Whew.
Sadly, since Qualcomm doesn’t go into specifics, there isn’t much meat for us to dig into. We do know however that each of the chipsets is powered by a Krait CPU, and that they support nearly every wireless standard under the sun, so these bad boys will likely see some play across the globe. Hopefully some more concrete details emerge soon, but for now we’ll have to take solace in the fact that the new S4 chipsets will start trickling into high-end tablets and smartphones sometime next year.