Reserving Krait cores for the upper segment of the market Qualcomm intends to further differentiate from the quad-core chips from other manufacturers, while to the majority of end users it did not matter what kind of architecture their SoC's in mobile devices have, as long as they provide good performance.

In the lower market segments Qualcomm has more competitors such as devices based on Rockchips processors or MediaTek's solutions. The latter company recently unveiled quad-core chips for smartphones and tablets, which will hit stores in the first quarter of next year.

[Ed – from what we are seeing the mobile market will soon become as competitive at the upper levels as the x86 market. Where things stand to go wrong is if they (ARM makers) continue to try and compete in the x86 market (servers etc) they have already gotten Intel as a competitor which is not good for ARM in terms of raw performance and compatibility. There are also some new studies that show that some original estimations of the power efficiency of ARM based processors might have been overstated While we do not expect to see x86 based SoCs to flood the market next year, we do expect to see them show up in more and more devices which will make things a bit rougher for ARM in the coming years.]

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