China’s smartphone chip designers to join forces to compete against Qualcomm

When it comes to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, Qualcomm is a name that pops up often as the company that supplies manufacturers SoCs. Granted there are other companies like Texas Instruments, NVIDIA and Samsung, but Qualcomm’s name is probably more commonplace to the extent that smartphone chip designers in China have reportedly (via Digitimes) merged together in order to be a more competitive force against Qualcomm.

Qualcomm and MediaTek have offered quad-core chip solutions and Qualcomm’s chip solutions can support CDMA 2000, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA and LTE, while MediaTek’s can support EDGE, WCDMA and TD-SCDMA, the sources indicated. In comparison, most of China-based designers’ chip solutions support EDGE and TD-SCDMA but not WCDMA and CDMA 2000, the sources pointed out.

It is unclear at this point what sort of implications this move might have, although we’re sure that the added competition might spur Qualcomm on to producing a better product – that or we could be looking at a new force to be reckoned with as far as SoCs are concerned that could lead to more powerful and/or efficient devices.