Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 632, 439 and 429 - Expanding the Low-Mid-tier
A month ago we saw Qualcomm release a new "upper mid-range" SoC with the announcement of the Snapdragon 710 – the emphasis was on the fact that this was a new market tier aiming slightly below the top-tier flagship chipsets. Today, we're seeing Qualcomm expand the traditional mid-tier and also what can be considered the low-end for smartphone devices. The Snapdragon 439 and 429 follow in the footsteps of the 435 and 425 and bring FinFET to the low-end; the Snapdragon 632 is more akin to the Snapdragon 652 as it's now the first time we see big cores brought down to the lower mid-tier successor to the Snapdragon 630.
The new systems on chips (SoCs) support dual rear cameras:
The octa-core 632 is unsurprisingly the headliner, and can support two 13-megapixel rear cameras for those all-important portrait and telephoto shots. It's up to 40 percent faster in raw computational power than the Snapdragon 626, and that means enough power for 4K video capture and "FHD+" resolution displays. Its cellular modem can handle LTE Advanced, too. The Adreno 506 graphics are only about 10 percent faster, but you're still looking at a chip that can handle at least some modern 3D games without flinching. And this being Qualcomm, AI processing plays a big role with support for neural network-assisted tasks like face unlock and object detection.
The octa-core Snapdragon 439 and quad-core 429, meanwhile, are focused more on stepping up the baseline quality for lower-cost devices. They make do with support for dual 8-megapixel cameras and won't handle 4K, but they should deliver up to 25 percent more CPU performance over their forebears (the 430 and 425) on top of the AI-related functions. The best bang for the buck comes with the 429 -- while the Adreno 505 graphics in the 439 are a respectable 20 percent faster, the Adreno 504 inside the 429 is a whopping 50 percent faster.
Finally, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Wear 2500, a smartwatch SoC... for kids.
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Qualcomm has updated their Snapdragon Wear SoC to include a low-power co-processor:
It's been two and a half years since Qualcomm last released a major new smartwatch chip, and in the time since, Android smartwatches have languished. But in the coming months, they could finally start seeing some meaningful improvements: Qualcomm is releasing a new processor for watches, called the Snapdragon Wear 3100, that's meant to extend battery life, enhance always-on displays, and offer more versatility when it comes to sports devices and fitness sensors.
The new chip's key feature is the addition of a secondary low-power processor, which is supposed to handle most of the work when a smartwatch isn't in use. This co-processor will power a watch's sensors and ambient display, doing so while using up to 20 times less energy than the main processor would, according to Qualcomm.
[...] For this chip generation, that's about all that's changing. Both the Wear 3100 and the Wear 2100, its predecessor, share the same main processor — so there's no reason to expect major speed gains. The co-processor is the main improvement, and that means almost all of the enhancements enabled by Qualcomm's new chip come from what the co-processor can do.
See also: Montblanc Summit 2 will be the first Snapdragon Wear 3100 watch
Related: Qualcomm Announces New Mid-Range 632, 439, and 429 Snapdragon SoCs
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday June 27 2018, @11:25PM (1 child)
or does this sound like a paraphrased press release.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 28 2018, @07:16AM
It said "announces" in the title... Were you expecting benchmarks, reviews and an acid bath followed by logic block analysis for silicon just getting released?
Anyhow, what's worth taking from this regurgitation is that “Qualcomm is winning. We are winning because we are investing.” seems directed at the anti-Chinese tariffs and restrictions that froze the buyout. Otherwise, I can't imagine who it was directed against seeing how almost all the SoC fabs and fablesses turned a profit in Q1/18 and Q2/18.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 28 2018, @02:51AM
All of these chips will make you feel like you're trying to run KDE Plasma on a 286.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday June 28 2018, @07:06AM
2 cameras, 1 chip. But the new phones have 5 cameras. They've lost their way. Sad!