Qualcomm Snapdragon Smartbooks: Competition for Intel Atom Netbooks

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor has been in the news lately for being the processor to have in your smartphone, but the powerful CPU is about to make the jump to small laptops. Qualcomm have confirmed that its processor from its ARM division has now been taken up by Lenovo and will appear in a range of new smartbooks.

This is huge news and Qualcomm hopes that its processors will offer serious competition for Intel’s Atom powered netbooks. The new smartbook range will be offered through AT&T, where customers will get some sort of contract subsidy.

According to Ars Technica the Snapdragon has a Cortex-A8 core and offers 1GHz of processing power, this not only offers great performance power but also energy efficiency as well. We all ready know that the chip is proving popular in a number of smartphones, such as the HTC HD2 and the much-anticipated Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, more phones are to follow soon.

The new range of smartbooks from Lenovo looks like a netbook but offers longer battery life, something that users have been wanting since the launch of these little laptops. According to PC World, the official launch of these new smartbooks will be during CES 2010 in January.

The new device is said to use a custom version of the Linux operating system, which we know offers great performance with no compromise on battery life. Let us know if you think the new Qualcomm Snapdragon processor is any match for the Intel Atom chip.