Qualcomm has announced three new smartphone chipsets in its mid-range tiers — the Snapdragon 653, 626 and 427. The chips are iterative updates on their predecessors, all touting improved performance and featuring Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 and dual camera technology adopted from the premium 800 tier.
Mid-tier strategy
“It has always been Qualcomm Technologies’ strategy to introduce industry-leading features first at the premium Snapdragon 800 tier design point, and then scale these features into our other Snapdragon products,” said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president of product management, in a release.
“A great example of this strategy is the use of dual camera for capturing high-quality photos that now range across our portfolio, including our 400 series mobile solution. Doing this allows our customers and smartphone developers to reach a broad subscriber base with advanced features and great end-user experiences.”
Advanced connectivity features like support for X9 LTE with CAT 7 modem and superior call clarity for VoLTE calls is also built into the new chips.
Snapdragon 653 and 626
The Snapdragon 1.95GHz 653 improves on the CPU and GPU performance speed of the octa-core 652 chipset by 10 percent. Even more impressive — it doubles the addressable RAM from 4GB to 8GB.
The Snapdragon 2.2GHz 626 features a 10 percent CPU performance bump over its predecessor, the octa-core 625, which is currently stocked in such devices as the Moto Z Play and Asus Zenfone 3. Additionally, Qualcomm’s signal boosting technology, TruSignal, was added to the new 600 tier family member.
During the same announcement, the company also put forward an impressive statistic regarding the 600 tier’s popularity. The company stated that over the past 12 months there have been over 400 manufacturer designs based on its Snapdragon 600 tier chips, with more than 300 already launched and 100 in the pipeline.
Snapdragon 427
As for the new 400 tier chip, Qualcomm says the 1.4GHz-clocked Snapdragon 427 features minor performance enhancements over the CPU and GPU performance of the Snapdragon 425 and is the first chip to bring Qualcomm’s aforementioned antenna boosting technology to the company’s 400 tier.
Both the 626 and 653 chipsets are expected to be commercially available by the end of 2016, while the Snapdragon 427 is expected to launch in commercial devices by early 2017.
Related: Qualcomm is reportedly in talks to acquire NXP Semiconductors
