Qualcomm launches mid-market Snapdragons

Ahead of MWC 2016, at which Qualcomm will be hoping to announce a raft of design wins, the company has launched three Snapdragon SoCs aimed at the mid-market.

The marketing follows the tried and tested ‘premium product at an affordable price’ routine common to many mass-market launches. All of them feature lots of Qualcomm goodness such as support for LTE carrier aggregation, the latest digital signal processing, and Qualcomm Quick Charge.

The Snapdragon 625 is made on a 14nm process incorporating an octa-core CPU based on ARM’s Cortex A-53 design and a X9 LTE modem which supports 4G+, defined as providing peak upload speeds of 150 Mbps. The DSP supports 24MP cameras and it has an Adreno 506 GPU. The Snapdragon 435 has an octa-core Cortex-A53 CPU but an Adreno 505 GPU and the Snapdragon 425 has a quad-core A 53 CPU and Adreno 308 GPU.

“We develop all of our processor technologies with scalability in mind, so that we can quickly and cost effectively accelerate the availability of premium tier capabilities within the rest of our portfolio of Snapdragon processors, making superior user experiences more accessible to a broader range of consumers,” said Alex Katouzian, SVP of product management at Qualcomm.

The loss of the Samsung Galaxy business a year ago revealed the scale of Qualcomm’s exposure to the premium tier and at the same time global smartphone volume growth is coming largely from cheaper devices. This means the mid-market is becoming increasingly important to Qualcomm and gives these launches enhanced strategic importance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbrnnOwzTBY