Qualcomm Unveils New Snapdragon SoCs for Mobiles, Smartwatches; First Gigabit LTE Modem

Qualcomm Technologies on Thursday introduced three new mobile chipsets, namely the Snapdragon 625, Snapdragon 435, and the Snapdragon 425. All three will become available in smartphones from the second half of 2016. As per the company, "the advancements and innovations inside these mobile processors are designed to support better experiences, higher performance, and longer battery life." It also unveiled a new SoC for smartwatches, the Snapdragon Wear 2100 (due in the first devices in the second half of 2016), and the Snapdragon X16 gigabit LTE modem (also due in the second half of 2016).

All three mobile SoCs include support for LTE with carrier aggregation, Wi-Fi 802.11ac with MU-MIMO, dual camera ISPs, Qualcomm Hexagon DSP (digital signal processor) for audio and a sensor hub, and Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0.

The Snapdragon 625 is also the company's first to use 14nm FinFET technology. The SoC features eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores at 2GHz; Qualcomm Adreno 506 GPU, and OpenGL ES 3.1+. It supports eMMC 5.1 storage with SD 3.0 (SDCC); LPDDR3 933MHz memory; up to 24-megapixel camera with Dual Image Sensor Processor (ISP); up to 4K resolution video capture and playback with H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC) support, and up to 1900x1200 display at 60fps or 1080p.

The chipset also supports X9 LTE connectivity with Global Mode LTE FDD, LTE TDD, WCDMA (DC-HSPA+, DC-HSUPA), CDMA1x, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM/EDGE. It can handle LTE Cat. 7 speeds of up to 300 Mbps download speeds and up to 150 Mbps upload speeds, up to 2x20 MHz carrier aggregation. On the connectivity front, the SoC supports USB 3.0, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.1.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 features four ARM Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.4GHz; Qualcomm Adreno 308 GPU, and OpenGL ES 3.0. It supports eMMC 5.1 storage; LPDDR3 667MHz memory; up to 16-megapixel camera with Dual Image Sensor Processor (ISP); up to 1080p video capture and playback with H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC), and up to 1280x800 display at 60fps or 720p.

The chipset comes with support for the X6 LTE connectivity with Global Mode LTE FDD, LTE TDD, WCDMA (DC-HSPA+, DC-HSUPA), CDMA1x, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM/EDGE. It can handle LTE Cat. 4 speeds of up to 150 Mbps download speeds and up to 75 Mbps upload speeds, and up to 2x20 MHz carrier aggregation. On the connectivity front, the SoC supports USB 2.0, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.1.

Lastly, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 sports eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.4GHz; Qualcomm Adreno 505 GPU, and OpenGL ES 3.1+. It supports eMMC 5.1 storage with SD 3.0 (UHS-I); LPDDR3 800MHz memory; up to 21-megapixel camera with Dual Image Sensor Processor (ISP); up to 1080p video capture and playback with H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC), and up to 1080p display at 60fps along with 1080p output.

The chipset supports X8 LTE connectivity with Global Mode LTE FDD, LTE TDD, WCDMA (DC-HSPA+, DC-HSUPA), CDMA1x, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM/EDGE. It can handle LTE Cat. 7 speeds of up to 300 Mbps download speed and up to 100 Mbps upload speed, and up to 2x20 MHz carrier aggregation. On the connectivity front, the SoC supports USB 2.0, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.1.

Coming to the Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC, the company says it is 30 percent smaller than the Snapdragon 400 used in most smartwatches nowadays, while also consuming 25 percent less power than it. The SoC's connectivity has also been boosted, and comes with improved modems for Bluetooth, LTE, and Wi-Fi.

Qualcomm's calling the Snapdragon X16 LTE the world's first commercially announced modem to support gigabit class LTE speeds - up to 1Gbps. It makes it 100 percent faster than its previous Snapdragon X10 LTE modem, that delivered speeds up to 450Mbps. It uses carrier-aggregation just like the Snapdragon X10, using three 20MHz carriers but capturing up to 10 streams of LTE data this time around with four antennas. Combined with new signal processing, it is able to boost the throughput of each stream to 100Mbps. The company said the X12 was the first to use this signal processing, with up to 6 streams of data at up to 600Mbps.