Normally, manufacturers wait for the upcoming Mobile World Congress exhibition to announce their cutting edge hardware, but Qualcomm has decided to hit the ground running. The company announced multiple new products this morning as well as a comprehensive rebranding of its modem technology.
Qualcomm has faced a growing threat from companies like MediaTek, Rockchip, and Allwinner, all of which offer low-cost SoCs based on ARM’s Cortex-A-class processors. The new Snapdragon 415, 420, 618, and 620 are intended to address this disparity.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, Qualcomm divides its products into an entry-level tier (Snapdragon 400), a mass-market / midrange (Snapdragon 600) and the premium flagship devices, Snapdragon 800. Enthusiasts tend to focus on the latest and greatest, but some of Qualcomm’s new products are going to carry serious teeth. The Snapdragon 400 family kicks things off with eight cores (two quad-core Cortex-A53 clusters) and an upgraded LTE modem.
The Snapdragon 600 chips are the real meat of the announcement. Just last week, we covered ARM’s announcement of its upcoming Cortex-A72. That chip is a refinement of the Cortex-A57 and it’s going to ship much more quickly than we first expected. The Snapdragon 618 will combine a pair of Cortex-A72’s with a quad-core Cortex-A53 in big.Little, while the Snapdragon 620 will use a full quad-core Cortex-A72 and set of Cortex-A53’s.
Qualcomm has taken some heat for stretching its previous custom architecture, the 32-bit “Krait” CPU that debuted nearly three years ago. The company’s willingness to launch ARM’s upcoming top-end CPU into its midrange Snapdragon line isn’t just good news for customers looking to buy new devices at something less than $600+ for an off-contract phone — it means that Qualcomm is confident its next-generation high-end architecture will be powerful enough to differentiate future Snapdragon 800 chips from the 600 family.
Given that the Cortex-A57 is winning praise for its increased efficiency and the Cortex-A72 is supposed to be a leap beyond that, Qualcomm is telegraphing a great deal of confidence in its next-generation processor. Both the 618 and the 620 will use LPDDR3 rather than LPDDR4 — Qualcomm is presumably saving the next-generation memory technology for the Snapdragon 800 chips.
As for the GPU and the associated IP blocks, the new 618 and 620 will include dual ISP (image signal processing) camera support, H.265 decode blocks, 4K video capture and playback, and multiple low-power sensors. Qualcomm’s integrated audio processor will support 192KHz/24-bit playback for audiophiles who insist on listening to 128-kbit/s MP3s on $5 earbuds.
Qualcomm’s modem rebrand
Along with these new SoCs, Qualcomm is rolling out a new modem technology initiative and branding effort that will attempt to distinguish, for the first time, what various levels of LTE service actually mean. We’ve seen this to some extent in the past, with some devices featuring an LTE-A modem, but the standard effort has largely broken down — witness the fact that “4G” service was actually little more than 3G+ in most markets.
Going forward, Qualcomm will brand its modems as Snapdragon parts. Modems will be differentiated from SoCs through the use of the letter X followed by a number, where higher numbers denote faster upload and download speeds with additional features. Its 20nm modems, known as the Gobi 9×35 family, are now denoted as X7 LTE, with 300Mbit download and 50Mbit upload. The Snapdragon 400 family will use a slower modem, known as the X5, while the new 600 and 800 chips will use the X8, X10, and X12 speeds as shown below.
This basic infographic is only meant to convey the general shape of the brand effort, not break down precisely which features are reserved for which modems. The X10 modem will debut in the Snapdragon 808 and 810 processors, while the X12 LTE modem will be a Gobi 9×40/9×45 chip. This implies that Qualcomm hasn’t settled on branding for future products, or that the X12 chip will be a standalone part.
Qualcomm’s aggressive position on these new parts is a message to its would-be competitors — the company is planning a rapid launch of Cortex-A57 parts on 20nm, but 14nm chips from Samsung, next-generation chips from ARM, and a new class of modems are all coming down the pipe in 2015. Some of those designs may not hit consumer products until 2016, but the smartphone giant is clearly planning to aggressively defend its territory.
