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Rumor: Next-Gen Kindle Fire Tablets to Use Qualcomm CPUs

kindle-fire-big-small-e-small[1]Boy Genius Report is back again today with new rumors about Amazon’s next tablets. According to their source,  Amazon will be forgoing Texas Instruments, Freescale, Rockchip, and other CPU makers and instead will be using Qualcomm’s rather pricy high-end CPUs in the next Kindle Fires.

BGR was the source oft the rumor a few weeks back which told us that the Kindle Fire line would be getting an update which included better specs and a new casing design, and today BGR says that:

Beginning with the upcoming new 7-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet, we already reported that the slate will feature a high-resolution 1,920 x 1,200-pixel display and a new design, and now we can fill in the blanks. We’re told the tablet will be powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974) system on a chip, which includes four Krait 400 CPUs and Adreno 330 graphics. Prototypes are said to be clocked at about 2GHz.

The new 7-inch Kindle Fire HD set to launch later this year also includes an upgrade to 2GB of RAM, a front-facing camera, Wi-Fi and available cellular connectivity. It will ship with either 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of internal storage according to our sources, and internal test units are currently running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean with Amazon’s heavy customizations. Considering how close we are to Amazon’s target launch timeframe, this will likely be the device’s operating system version at launch.

The larger 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD model Amazon is planning to release this fall features specs similar to the 7-inch model behind its 2,560 x 1,600-pixel high-definition display. Sources state that the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset will power the tablet and it will also feature the same front-facing camera, optional cellular data support, internal storage sizes and 2GB of RAM. The 8.9-inch model will also feature an 8-megapixel rear camera though, while the 7-inch model will not include a rear camera.

We’re told that the look and feel of Amazon’s next-generation Kindle Fire HD tablets are vastly improved compared to the current models, and we detailed several design changes in our earlier exclusive report. The new tablets are said to be more comfortable and lighter than the models they will replace; the current 7-inch Kindle Fire HD model weighs 13.9 ounces and the 8.9-inch model weighs 20 ounces.

So is it true?

I don’t know, but it certainly sounds like it could be true. The OS version and hardware specs are somewhere in the range of what I would expect Amazon to use, though that doesn’t mean anything. For all we know this could be a well-constructed fiction.

One thing we can say is that Amazon probably won’t be using a TI Omaps CPU.  Texas Instruments shuttered that unit late last year. But other than that, there’s not even very many rumors for me to repeat.

We’ll have to wait for Amazon to leak more details before we can know for sure.

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