Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 430, 617 SoCs: Incremental Updates

While the Snapdragon 820 is most likely to capture public attention as a halo product, Qualcomm has also been working on updating their mid-range SoCs. The first update announced was the Snapdragon 617, which appears to be similar to the Snapdragon 615 with an updated X8 modem for UE category 7 LTE, with support for carrier aggregation of up to 2 20 MHz carriers. The DSP is in the same family as the Snapdragon 615, but it looks like the DSP might have been rebranded. The ISP is shared with the Snapdragon 620, which allows for cameras with resolutions as high as 21MP.

The Snapdragon 430 goes along a similar line of thought, but with a bump to 8 cores from the 4 cores of the Snapdragon 410/412. The GPU is also updated to Adreno 505 from the Adreno 306, but what this translates to is effectively unknown. The Snapdragon 430 will also have a UE category 4 modem with the ability to aggregate two 10 MHz downlink carriers for 150 Mbps and Category 5 uplink speeds of 75 Mbps. The ISP will be shared with the Snapdragon 617, which means dual ISPs that can enable a 21MP camera. Both SoCs and the Snapdragon 820 will support Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0, which improves charge efficiency and/or charge rate over Quick Charge 2.0.