Last month, Qualcomm revealed a new tiered structure for its Snapdragon SoCs, listing the 800 and 600 chips as the ideal solution for premier and high-end smartphones, tablets and mobile computing devices. Now the company has revealed the two remaining tiers – the Snapdragon 400 and 200 – aimed at the mid-tier and entry level smartphone segments.
Qualcomm said on Wednesday that the Snapdragon 400 was designed to deliver the performance, connectivity and battery life of a high-volume smartphone or tablet. It's offered as both dual-core and quad-core chips across nine variants, and includes the Adreno 305 GPU, enabling 3D gaming, highly responsive user interfaces and fast web browsing.
According to Qualcomm, the dual-core version features two Krait CPUs running at up to 1.7 GHz per core. It also sports Asynchronous Symmetric Multiprocessing (aSMP), which delivers peak performance while staying extremely efficient. The quad-core chip features four ARM Cortex-A7 CPUs running at up to 1.4 GHz per core, making it an ideal solution for entry-level devices.
In addition to the cores, the Snapdragon 400 also features support for all the key modem technologies "that matter around the world", LPDDR2 and LPDDR3 RAM, and Miracast for wirelessly displaying content directly to an HDTV. It also supports "rich" multimedia capabilities like 13.5MP cameras, 1080p video capture and playback, and more.
As for the Snapdragon 200, it's designed to deliver a balance of value and performance, the company said. It's only offered as a quad-core chip across two variants, packing ARM Cortex-A5 CPUs up to 1.4 GHz per core and an Adreno 203 GPU. Other features include support for Hexagon QDSP5, LPDDR2 RAM, HD video playback, high-accuracy GPS, and an 8MP camera. Also thrown into the mix are CDMA multimode and UMTS modem options, and multi-SIM capabilities of dual-SIM dual standby.
"These new Snapdragon 400 and 200 processors make many of the most coveted Snapdragon processing technologies available to more people," said Tim McDonough, vice president of marketing at Qualcomm mobile & Computing.
Devices using these two new Snapdragon chips will launch sometime this year, he said.
