While Qualcomm will no doubt be pushing the use of its powerful Snapdragon 810 chipsets onto manufacturers looking to build their next flagship handsets, the company has recently announced four new chipsets which appear to be pretty powerful, but are aimed at emerging markets and mid-range devices.These chipsets are the Snapdragon 415, 425, 618, and the 620. According to Qualcomm, “Many high-end, premium goodies that mobile phone users typically see in a premium phone like the Google Nexus 6or Samsung GALAXY Note 4, enabled by a Snapdragon 800 class processor, are cascading down to the rest of our Snapdragon family. Today, you can see some of that effect.”
So what can we expect from these new chipsets from Qualcomm? For starters, all four of them will support 4G LTE connectivity which means that if you’re just after a 4G LTE smartphone but don’t want to fork out money for a flagship, then future mid-range handsets packing any of these chipsets should support it.
The Snapdragon 415 will be the successor to the 410 and will offer up a 64-bit octa-core processor with support for 720p resolutions. The Snapdragon 425 will be able to support high-quality cameras and will take advantage of Qualcomm’s Hexagon application DSP which should hopefully result in better battery savings.
The Snapdragon 620 will sport new ARM Cortex-A72 CPUs and the next-gen Adreno GPU. It will support UHD capture and playback and QHD display resolutions. The Snapdragon 618 will be the same, except that it is the hexa-core variant of the Snapdragon 620. Devices that will be powered by any of these chipsets are expected to be released in the second half of 2015.