Qualcomm today announced the addition of two new mobile processors to their Snapdragon family: the 430 and the 617. These new processors are slated to find their way into mid-range smartphones, bringing several connectivity and multimedia enhancements to this segment.
The Snapdragon 430 now supports a new generation of 4G--X6 LTE with Cat 6 download speeds of up to 150Mbps and Cat 5 upload speeds of up to 75Mbps. This chip also includes a feature called carrier aggregation, enabling phones to ‘bond’ carrier frequency bands (in this case 2 x 10MHz bands) resulting in faster data transfer rates within a given coverage area.
On the multimedia front, the 430 chipset now features support for dual camera configurations with sensors up to 21 megapixels. Compared to its predecessors, its graphics capabilities are heightened with the inclusion of Qualcomm’s own Adreno 505 GPU with support for graphics APIs such as Open GL ES3.1, Android Extension Pack, and OpenCL 2.0--features that were initially found only in higher-end chipsets.
The 617 chipset ups the ante on both the connectivity and multimedia fronts with support for the X8 LTE standard that supports Cat 7 download speeds of up to 300Mbps and upload speeds of up to 100Mbps, once again using carrier aggregation (in this case bi-directional and using 2 x 20MHz bands.) This new chip also shares the same software enhancements, dual-ISP and camera architecture of the Snapdragon 620 and 618.
Both of these new processors utilize the power-efficient ARM Cortex A53 CPU in octa-core configurations, also incorporating a specialized DSP for high-definition audio. Expect the Snapdragon 420 to make its way into phones beginning Q2 of 2016, and the 617 to be commercially available by the end of this year.
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