A first taste of the processing performance which 4G smartphones will have in the next two years came from Qualcomm today at Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona.
The semiconductor supplier previewed its next generation Snapdragon mobile graphics processor which will have four cores each running at 2.5GHz.
Today's smartphones are based on a single core processor running at 1GHz.
See also: Mobile World Congress: Your Electronics Weekly guideQualcomm said the quad-core chip, the APQ8064, would not be available before the start of next year.
Likely to be ARM processor based, the 28nm chip demonstrates the processing and graphics performance which the market can expect from 4G LTE smartphones within a few years.
The chipset is intended to support larger screens, stereoscopic 3D and multi-channel audio, as well as driving 1080p HD video displays via an HDMI links.
Qualcomm has developed a new processor architecture for the chip, called Krait.
The chipset will include four 2.5GHz processor cores and the Adreno 320 quad-core graphics processor.
It will support camera phones with 20Mpixel imagers, and will support to cameras for 3D video.
The graphics chip will have "15 times the performance of the original Adreno GPU," said the company.
There will support for PC-style memory access with DDR3 ad DDR2 memory.There will be PC-style interfaces such as USB ports and a PCIe.
Support for at least two of the three the big mobile operating systems - Android and Windows Phone - is inevitable.
Yesterday, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop surprised MWC 2011 by admitting that the mobile market was now a battle of operating systems not handset technology.
Richard Wilson, Barcelona