Qualcomm raised the ante in smartphone processors this morning in shipping samples of the first dual-core Snapdragon chips. The 1.2GHz MSM8260 (for HSPA+ 3G) and MSM8660 (for EVDO Rev B) are already faster for normal tasks but thrive with a multithreaded OS and apps. They should be some of the first to let smartphones dedicate a processor to a background task and could make multitasking near seamless with Android and other platforms.
