Wired application and networking is the market segment that nowadays encompasses overly popular smartphones and tablets.

With 40nm mobile chips will get all the way to 1.8GHz with Texas Instruments OMAP 4470, and with next year’s migration to 28nm the speeds will increase yet again.

We expect to see many smartphones and tablets with 28nm chips in 2012, but at this point you cannot put an exact date on the release, since 28nm chips are still months away. Many industry insiders that we meet the other day at Globalfoundries technology conference seem to believe that Nvidia might be the first with Wayne, but we will have to wait and see.

These 28nm chips can operate with only 0.9V, while there is an indication that Intel has mobile chips set for the future based on 0.7V voltage, something that can make a big difference in the crucial task of improving battery life in upcoming devices. We also heard that once the industry moves to 20nm, which should happen in late 2013 for test production and 2014 for volume production, you should see even faster mobile chips, probably even faster than 4.0GHz.

It’s interesting to note that the PC processor industry never got passed 3.6GHz without overclocking.