Back in October, Qualcomm decided to talk a bit about its S4, a 28nm system-on-chip that we covered here.

This was followed with record revenues, earnings and MSM chipset shipments announced two days ago, with an impressive $4.12 billion in revenue, up 39 percent year over year and 14 percent sequentially, coupled with operating income of $1.24 billion, up 29 percent and net income of $1.06 billion up 22 percent year-on-year.

It looks like that this trend might continue in 2012 as Enrico Salvatori, Senior Vice President, Qualcomm & President, QCT Europe has just confirmed that the company’s Snapdragon S4 dual-core 28nm chip samples were already shipped to customers.

They are developing phones and tablets as we speak and you can expect to see this 1.7GHz dual core, 28nm based chip with Krait core in early 2012. We could not get a better date than that, but we heard that it should happen sooner rather than later but this also depends on the companies who are making the actual products based on MSM 8960.

Enrico talked about reduced power consumption, better integration, LTE category 3 support as well as all kind of HSDPA that you can imagine, as well as better Adreno 225 graphics. MSM 8960 can also work at lower frequencies, and we've seen that sometimes companies decide to ship these products at lower clocks than maximum, to improve power efficiency.

According to Qualcomm, this is the chip to look and Enrico also mentioned that such LTE / HSDPA+ integration as well as multiple frequency support that can cover almost all countries and standards, will become very attractive to tablet manufacturers who will like to have an all-in-one, system on chip solution inside.

Qualcomm is currently the only company that can offer, dual core CPU, 28nm, LTE modem and decent graphics with Adreno 225 (DirectX 9, shader model 3). One thing is certain, 2012 and 28nm will bring a lot of excitement in both smartphone and tablet markets, possible even in the notebook and PC space.