Qualcomm said on Thursday that its newest dual-core Snapdragon APQ8060 processor was designed to compete in the tablet market against Texas Instruments and Nvidia.

The newest member of the Snapdragon family, Qualcomm's APQ8060 dual-CPU processor, powers the HP TouchPad, which HP introduced on Wednesday.

Qualcomm's embedded CPUs and GPUs are designed from the ground up to deliver high processing and 3D graphics performance with high efficiency to extend battery life. The 8x60 family, with the APQ8060 being the newest addition, is part of the third generation of the Snapdragon family and it is aimed at multi-tasking smartphones and tablets. The third-generation includes: two asynchronous processor cores; an integrated Adreno 220 GPU with twice the processing power of its predecessor; support for up to a 16 Megapixel camera; and can capture and display HD 1080P stereoscopic video or 8 Megapixel stereoscopic still images to an autostereoscopic panel or a 3DTV (via HDMI).

The company's second generation Snapdragon single-core family of CPUs is already powering numerous smartphones that are commercially available today, including the recently launched Sharp Galapagos 003SH, a 3D entertainment smartphone. The Galapagos 003SH is powered by the Snapdragon MSM8255 processor, which provides the ability to capture and display pictures, as well as play movies, in stereoscopic 3D without the use of glasses. The Galapagos 003SH also supports the Adreno 205 GPU for 3D gaming capability in addition to a 9.6 Megapixel camera and HD 720p video for playback and recording.

"With more than 75 Snapdragon devices already announced, 150 Snapdragon devices in development and over 100 high end mobile games optimized for our GPU, Qualcomm continues to be a leader in delivering high performance devices to market," said Raj Talluri, vice president of product management for Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is competing with Nvidia in the tablet chips market, Nvidia has led tablet design wins so far this year with its Tegra 2. Its shares are up almost 50 percent since the end of December.

Earlier this week, Texas Instruments announced its newest mobile processor, the OMAP 5, which is also a two-core processor and will be available for tablet and phone makers to test in the second half of 2011.

All three chipmakers' mobile processors' are based on an energy efficient architecture licensed to them by ARM Holdings.

Qualcomm also had a design win when research firm IHS iSuppli said Apple's new CDMA iPhone 4 for Verizon uses the company's MDM6600 baseband/RF transceiver chip, rather than Infineon?s baseband chip.