When it comes to the companies who design the silicon that sits within the myriad consumer electronic devices we all carry around, the push is always more and faster. Increasingly though, power consumption is becoming a crucial factor. It's especially the case for US company Qualcomm, whose technology powers many phones, PDAs and other portable devices, especially in North America and Asia.

So quite how it's managed to design the 45nm QSD8672 chip, which features two cores that can run at speeds up to 1.5GHz, while also claiming a full range of 3G mobile broadband and peripheral connectivity capabilities, integrated 2D and 3D graphics engines and an "exceptionally long battery life," we really don't know. Heck, we're not electrical engineers.

The technology is being rolled out as part of Qualcomm's Snapdragon architecture, an ARM-based CPU design, which will be used in future mobile computing devices ranging from smartphones to netbooks. Indeed, Qualcomm claim it will be able to power screens of up to 12 inches at resolutions up to 1440x900 pixels (WSXGA).

Try fitting that in your back pocket.

"With its exceptional computing power and improved energy efficiency, the QSD8672 chip allows us to enable more advanced devices that are essentially always on, always awake and always connected," reckoned Luis Pineda, senior vice president of marketing and product management for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies.

The full skinny in terms of connectivity features includes HSPA+ for up to 28 Mbps on the downlink and up to 11 Mbps on the uplink, plus GPS, Bluetooth, 1080p high-definition video recording and playback, wi-fi and mobile TV technologies such as MediaFLO, DVB-H and ISDB-T.

The first pre-production chips should be available for OEMs in the summer of 2009. Then we'll get to see what sort of hardware the QSD8672 will end up powering.