At its annual Innovation Qualcomm (IQ2010) event here in London the company revealed that it is already sampling 1.5GHz and dual-core Snapdragon chips to its partner manufacturers. As a result it expects 1.5GHz devices to be arriving within the first quarter of next year, while dual-core products will also be hitting shelves before the end of summer 2011. As such hope to be seeing working devices at this years Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas at the start of January.

Snapdragon is Qualcomm’s System On a Chip (SOC) line that has been used in such popular smartphones as the HTC Desire and Dell Streak, and it can also be found in many of the tablets we’ve been seeing recently including the Viewsonic Viewpad 7 and Archos 7 Internet Tablet. The chips incoroporate low power CPUs based on ARM technology, graphics processors, video processors, and all the wireless circuitry parts you’d expect like 3G, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

These 1.5GHz (MSM8260 and MSM8660) and dual-core (QSD8672) parts are the third generation Snapdragon products that have improved processing power and power saving as well as the speed and core-number improvements. The dual-core parts have interesting implications for the tablet market, which if they continue to grow in capabilities will soon be needing a couple of CPUs to handle everything.

As part of the same presentation where the company revealed this little nugget, it also mentioned that it ships 100million chips a month, a figure we found rather staggering and something to think about next time you pay £500 for your next smartphone.