Qualcomm Announces Quick Charge 3.0: Intelligent Voltage Control

One of the other features that was announced for multiple Snapdragon SoCs at the 3G/LTE Summit in Hong Kong was Quick Charge 3.0, which will be supported on the Snapdragon 820, 617, and 430.

The latest iteration of Qualcomm’s rapid charging technology, Quick Charge 3.0 is said to enable up to 27% faster charging over QC 2.0 or up to 38% more efficient. Relative to QC 1.0, charge speed doubles. This is done by using an algorithm that Qualcomm calls Intelligent Negotiation for Optimum Voltage, which allows for selection of appropriate voltage for various device states while charging. Rather than a number of fixed voltage settings, QC 3.0 can scale from 3.6 to 20V in 200 mV increments and will work over USB, including new connector designs like USB Type-C as the USB protocol is not the same as physical connector design. QC 3.0 will be available for vendors to implement now, and it’s likely that we’ll see phones with support for this new fast charging standard appear early next year.

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.

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 820 Modem Configuration: X12 LTE

At Qualcomm’s 3G/LTE Summit in Hong Kong, Qualcomm released some details about the modem that will be integrated into their Snapdragon 820 SoC. On the LTE side, Qualcomm is using what they call an X12 modem, which supports UE category 12 on the …