The latest system on a chip offering from Qualcomm in the Snapdragon series is a cracker. The Snapdragon 800 is Qualcomms first to support LTE Advanced which allows aggregation of LTE channels to improve speed and efficiency.
LTE-A ultimately will allow the aggregation of up to five 20MHz channels from different LTE bands which will deliver up to 1 Gbps down to the mobile and 500 Mbps up. There is an excellent white paper on 3GPP Release 9 and beyond including LTE-A on the 3G Americas web site here.
The Snapdragon 800 chip has the more modest support for two channel aggregation which yeilds LTE Category 4 downlink speeds of up to 150Mbps. The Snapdragon 800 is manufactured for Qulacomm by Taiwan’s TSMC using its new 28nm High Performance Mobile process. As well as running LTE-A the Snapdragon 800 chip also supports LTE FDD, LTE TDD, WCDMA, CDMA1x, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM it has quad core processor which can run up to 2.3 GHz per core. It supports USB3, Bluetooth (4.0), WiFI (802.11ac), GPS, up to 55 M pixel camera and 1080p and extenal 4K (3840X2160) video. It is amazing how much can done on a single low power chip. There is more information here .
The Snapdragon is currently used in LTE-A versions of some phones icluding the Samsung Galaxy S4 for use by SK Telecom in Korea on its LTE-A equipped network. It is understood that SK are in negotiations for inclusion of LTE-A in the upcoming iPhone 5S. As both Samsung and Apple have used earlier Qualcomm Snapdragon chips there is a good chance the 800 will appear in upcoming products.