CES 2013: ST-Ericsson unveils NovaThor L8580 2.5GHz chipset

It looks like the mobile chipset escalation hasn't ended. According to GSMArena, ST-Ericsson has unveiled its latest NovaThor chipset, dubbed the L8580. It runs on four Cortex-A9 cores clocked at up to 2.5GHz and powered by the PowerVR SGS544 GPU. The chip has the ability to go low-power and run at 0.6V.

STE has unveiled a new low-cost high-power chip

The chip seems to be aimed at making lower cost devices that have good processing power and battery life. While the higher end devices will probably use some of the more powerful chips that were unveiled, such as the Exynos 5 Octa, the Tegra 4 and Snapdragon's 600 and 800 SoCs, the ST-Ericsson L8580 could very well be used for low and mid-end devices thanks to the low cost from using Cortex A9 processors.

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Samsung had recently unveiled the Exynos Octa chip, which is designed to be a low powered, high performance chipset for mobiles. According to Samsung, the performance of the chip is twice than that of anything available in the market today when it comes to 3D gaming. While the company hasn't unveiled full details about the chip yet, this chip may be able to run dual quad-core setups on a 28nm process.

Nvidia unveiled its own next-gen chip—the Tegra 4—earlier this week. The new processor boasts a number of improvements, including 72 graphics cores and better imaging capabilities. The CPU is based on ARM's latest Cortex A-15 architecture, which gives it a considerable boost compared to the current ARM Cortex A-9 based Tegra 3 quad-core chipset. The new chip sticks to Tegra 3's 4-plus-1 design. In this design, a fifth smaller core helps regulate the power among the four more powerful cores.

The other major chips unveiled at CES were Qualcomm's new 2.3GHz quad-core processors. Qualcomm has unveiled the new Snapdragon 600 and 800 chips at the ongoing CES 2013. The new SoCs are going to be making an appearance in high-end devices and Smart TVs in the next six months.

Qualcomm claims that the Snapdragon 800 offers 1.75 times better performance than the S4. While this is yet to be seen, the specifications of the new SoC include 28nm HPm fabrication, an upgraded Hexagon V5 digital signal processor, 800MHz LPDDR3 memory, Krait 400 architecture running at clock speeds of up to 2.3GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU.

The Snapdragon 600 seems to be an upgraded version of the S4 with some tweaks to the architecture, including a 1.9GHz maximum clock speed, an Adreno 320 GPU and LPDDR3 memory. Both the 600 and the 800 include 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Miracast HD at 1080p and 150Mb/s LTE with Advanced Carrier Aggregation.