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from the when-good-enough-is-good-enough dept.
Companies like Xiaomi plan to use Qualcomm's new 4G Snapdragon processors.
Tech companies can't stop talking about 5G, but chip giant Qualcomm has still got plenty in store for 4G: three new LTE processors for midrange and lower-end phones.
The company late Monday unveiled its Snapdragon 720G, 662 and 460 processors to give less expensive phones faster 4G connectivity. The new chips also have Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, as well tech to improve a phone's artificial intelligence and photography capabilities.
Xiaomi is one company that plans to use the Snapdragon 720G, which is geared for gaming phones. The processor is similar to Qualcomm's 760G, which gives gaming phones integrated 5G connectivity. Other handset makers in India, like Realme, also have said they'll use Qualcomm's new 4G processors this year.
The company said devices using the Snapdragon 720G will hit the market this quarter, while phones based on the Snapdragon 662 and 460 will be available by the end of 2020.
[...] The company's Snapdragon 720G provides smooth HDR game play and realistic graphics. It also lets users shoot 4G video or 192-megapixel photos and has Qualcomm's newest, fifth-generation AI engine that's also found in its higher-end processors. The technology "will enable a host of new AI experiences for gaming, photography, voice assistants and virtually always-on contextual awareness," the company said.
The Snapdragon 720G also comes with an integrated X15 LTE modem that's capable of download speeds of up to 800 Mbps.
The Snapdragon 662 supports triple camera configurations, a first for the company's 6-series chips. It will also have Qualcomm's third-generation AI engine to let phone makers add things like avatars, night photography and face and voice authentication to cheaper phones. The processor comes integrated with the new X11 LTE modem that can download data at up to 390 Mbps.
And the Snapdragon 460, aimed at cheap phones, gets a big boost in performance and connectivity speeds. The new CPU is 70% faster than the chip's predecessor, the Snapdragon 450, while the GPU is 60% faster. Overall the system's performance is double that of the older chip. Like the Snapdragon 662, the Snapdragon 460 also includes the third-generation AI engine and an integrated X11 modem.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday January 24 2020, @02:58PM
Sorry, that post you linked is based on misinformation. It's also called "spin" where a person with an opinion picks and chooses "facts" to support only their narrow point of view. It's one of the many logical fallacies, and I'm not expert on identifying logical fallacies- there are too many https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies [wikipedia.org] but some posters here on SN are expert and may weigh in.
5G is a very broad spec, as I already wrote. If you glance at this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands [wikipedia.org], you'll see that right now the spec ranges from a low band of 600 MHz which is lower than your current phone and will therefore go much farther, to high bands of up to 40 GHz, and there is talk/work/proposal to go to 70 - 80 GHz.
Yes, more cell sites will be needed for the 40 GHz stuff, but they will be much smaller, largely due to the fact that the higher the frequency, the smaller the antenna. And, to minimize losses, the smaller and more tightly packed the electronics need to be. So in cities, there will be lots of higher frequency cell sites.
But do not get caught up in thinking there must necessarily be more sites- your phone automatically switches to the bands it can find.
The real catch is: just saying you have a 4G or 5G phone means very little. I've been comparing phone specs and the actual bands that phones can do varies wildly from phone to phone.