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When Amazon brought the Kindle Fire HD line-up, it felt like a move to the mid-range market. The specs were better and Amazon actually cared about what the device looked like. The Kindle Fire was heavy, ugly, but it worked and it brought Amazon’s incredible content ecosystem.
Now we are going to see the third generation of the Kindle Fire HD, possibly the Kindle Fire 2. This time, it will not be for low-end or mid-range consumers, the Kindle Fire HD units look set to tackle the top of the food chain head on, with incredible specs and performance to beat the iPad and other competitors.
Getting The Right Processor
Amazon and Texas Instruments connected when the Kindle Fire was born, the two companies started working together and this may have been one of TI’s biggest successes in the mobile processing space, garnering a few million sales during its lifespan.
The Kindle Fire HD reclined the connection between Amazon and Texas Instruments, at the time TI were close to pulling out of the mobile processing market and we even heard rumours of Amazon looking to acquire TI for their processing knowledge, for future mobile projects, this never came to anything but a rumour.
With Texas Instruments out the equation, the next Kindle Fire HD tablets will need to be powered by a new processor and if rumours are to be believed, a fast one, capable of running at top speeds on Android. The obvious candidate would be the Snapdragon 800, the 2.2GHz quad-core beast can power past anything on the mobile market currently.
Qualcomm also owns the Snapdragon brand, being an American company, it may tie in with Amazon’s move to keep business at home and not in China, where Foxconn manufacturers their Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD units. We do not believe NVIDIA will be in the running, while the Tegra 4 processor is good for graphics and gaming, it does not beat the Snapdragon 800 on performance.
The last processor to come to mind is from MediaTek, a Taiwanese based chip manufacturer who have just created the first actual octo-core processor. This is built on big.LITTLE ARM technology and will run multitasking incredibly quick, something we believe Amazon will bring to the new line of Kindle Fire HDs.
MediaTek apparently got its first big buyer for the processor and all hands point to Amazon. The Kindle Fire HD would be the first tablet to have the octo-core processor inside and with 2GB of RAM we can see it zooming past the competition, currently the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Note 8.0.
Amazon is likely to release these new Kindle Fire HD tablets at the end of this year, alongside a cheap revamp to the original Kindle Fire.
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