Broadcom Looking to Compete With Qualcomm With Android-Ready Chipset
Broadcom – the company who probably makes the wireless card inside your laptop – is looking to step their chipset game up and try to make some noise in mobile. They’re introducing two new chipsets that will be Android 2.3-supported out of the box. (Whatever that means.)
In one offering – the BCM21850 – they’ve added two 1.1GHz Cortex-A9 chips for dual-core heaven. All of the usual features you’d expect out of today’s chipsets are present, including the ability to play back 1080p HD video. There was no word on which GPU would be accompanying the processors, unfortunately.
They also have a couple of single core offerings that don’t sound as impressive, but could be a great option for OEMs looking to create low-cost handsets with decent power.
With these moves, Broadcom is starting to sound more like Qualcomm, who provides ARM-based chipsets that aren’t as inspiring as offerings from NVIDIA or Samsung, but are very attractive to OEMs not looking to throw a lot of money into a handset. They aren’t the first, of course, so time will tell just how well they’ll end up doing. [IntoMobile]