Snapdragon is a family of mobile system on chips by Qualcomm. Qualcomm considers Snapdragon a "platform" for use in smartphones, tablets, and smartbook devices.
Qualcomm is an American global telecommunication corporation that designs,
manufactures and markets digital wireless telecommunications products
and services based on its code division multiple access (CDMA)
technology and other technologies. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, USA.
The company operates through four segments: Qualcomm CDMA Technologies
(QCT); Qualcomm Technology Licensing (QTL); Qualcomm Wireless &
Internet (QWI), and Qualcomm Strategic Initiatives (QSI).
Scorpion is a CPU built by Qualcomm based on the ARMv7 instruction set. It is designed in-house but has many architectural similarities with the ARM Cortex-A8 and ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs.
The original Snapdragon CPU, dubbed Scorpion, is Qualcomm's own design. It has many features similar to those of the ARM Cortex-A8 core and it is based on the ARM v7 instruction set, but theoretically has much higher performance for multimedia-related SIMD operations. The successor to Scorpion, found in S4 Snapdragon SoCs is named Krait and has many similarities with the ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and is also based on the ARMv7 instruction set.
All Snapdragon processors contain the circuitry to decode high-definition video (HD) resolution at 720p or 1080p depending on the Snapdragon chipset
