Qualcomm Snapdragon S4: photographic potential

When you judge a modern System on a Chip often we focus only on the ability of the embedded processor, or at most of the graphics subsystem, forgetting that a SoC is composed of several modules, and among these, there is also the one who manages the camera sensor. But today's smartphones and tablets are becoming more multimedia information, including the features related to the performance of the camera acquire greater prominence.

For this reason, probably Qualcomm has posted on his blog, behind the upcoming Mobile World Congress, an interesting technical article that dissects the main features of its new Snapdragon S4 for the management of video and images. Of these SoC already knew many details: they will be made ​​with the lithographic process to 28 nm, there are also versions with quad-core module LTE, so that further reduce power consumption with excellent performance in 3D environment using GPUs next generation of the family Adreno .

Nothing was known so far of the potential of the form ISP (Image Signal Processor). The surprises are many and very interesting. So the new module will be able to handle up to 20 Mpixel sensor and Full HD video capture with 1080p resolution and framerate of 30 FPS. But that's not all, indeed. Among the most innovative features for example there is the possibility to manage up to 3 cameras, with the third way that can be used to capture three-dimensional images or video.