Qualcomm announces integrated LTE chips in Snapdragon 400

Qualcomm has announced that its upcoming quad-core processor will have built-in LTE capabilities. This will potentially make manufacturing LTE-enabled handsets much easier than it currently is. According to VentureBeat, the chip—the Snapdragon 400—is slated for launch later this year, so we will undoubtedly start seeing handsets running on these chips before the end of the year.

Integrating the wireless capabilities on one chip helps streamline a handset's internals, thus leaving more room for other things, such as a better GPU or even a bigger battery. It can also potentially reduce prices of manufacturing phones with LTE capabilities, and by extension, make LTE-enabled phones more affordable to the public. Qualcomm has gone on the record to state that the chip is intended for emerging regions.

The Snapdragon 400 will have a built-in LTE modem

The Snapdragon 400 chips were first unveiled back in February. Snapdragon 400 processors are designed to deliver the performance, connectivity and battery life that consumers expect in high volume smartphones and tablets, and include the following features:

The direct competition to the chip comes from Nvidia's Tegra 4i, which also has an integrated LTE chip. The Tegra 4i essentially integrates the Tegra 4 with Nvidia's i500 LTE modem. This helps cut the size of the chip down to half of that of other chips.