The Qualcomm Snapdragon family of SoC processors are well-known among smartphones and tablet users since many devices are actually powered by one. However, Qualcomm will be renaming the tiers in its Snapdragon family from previous S-based designation (S1, S2, S3 and S4) which reflect the processor’s generation to numeric system (200, 400, 600 and 800) starting from this year onwards.
As one might expect, the numeric system corresponds to the performance level of each Snapdragon’s family member. Here’s a summary of each Snapdragon tiers under the new system:
Snapdragon 800 Processors: designed to deliver blazing fast apps and web browsing, visually stunning graphics, breakthrough multimedia capabilities, seamless communications virtually anytime, anywhere, and outstanding battery life for premium smartphones, Smart TVs, digital media adapters and tablets.Snapdragon 600 Processors: designed to deliver outstanding performance for today’s coolest apps, fast web browsing, seamless connectivity and great battery life for mid-high tier smartphones and tablets.Snapdragon 400 Processors: are designed to deliver the performance, features, connectivity and battery life that consumers expect in high volume smartphones and tablets.Snapdragon 200 Processors: are designed to deliver a valued balance of performance, robust connectivity and better battery life for entry level smartphones.
The newly announced Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 and 800 processors are the first group of Snapdragon processor to be introduced under the new tier system. They are already available to device manufacturers for sampling right now, with products based on them are expected to be out in the market by the second quarter and middle of 2013 respectively.
As mentioned above, Qualcomm has announced two new Snapdragon processor series that are expected to power numerous premium and high-end mobile devices respectively later this year. One of them is the new Snapdragon 800 series processors which are currently the most advance processor series that the company has created
Among features that are available within the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 series processors are:
- Quad-core Krait 400 CPU with clock speed of up to 2.3 GHz per core.
- Adreno 330 GPU that offers 2 times better compute performance than Adreno 320.
- Support for 2 x 32-bit LPDDR3 RAM at 800MHz with memory bandwidth of 12.8GBps.
- Support for 4G LTE Cat 4 150Mbps and 802.11ac 1Gbps connectivity.
- Support for UltraHD (4096×2304 resolution, also known as 4K) capture, playback and display at 30fps.
- Support for DTS-HD, Dolby Digital Plus and 7.1 surround sound.
- Dual Image Signal Processors for Qualcomm Snapdragon Camera, with support for computational camera
- Overall performance boost of up to 75% better performance than the Snapdragon S4 Pro.
Qualcomm has stated that the Snapdragon 800 series processors will not only appeared in future smartphones and tablets but also Smart TVs and digital media adapters. On another hand, the other new processor by Qualcomm – Snapdragon 600 – is not too shabby as well with features such as:
- Quad-core Krait 300 CPU, with clock speed of up to 1.9 GHz.
- Speed enhanced Adreno 320 GPU
- Support for LPDDR3 RAM
- Overall performance boost of up to 40% better performance than the Snapdragon S4 Pro processor.
With more than 50 combined design wins for both series of processors, expect to see quite a number of products running on either Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 or 600 processors soon enough. That being said, we do wonder at what price point that these devices are going to be especially considering the fact that they are going to be high-end and premium devices.
[Image: Qualcomm's Twitter]
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