Qualcomm Announces Its New Snapdragon 616 SoC
August 11, 2015 - Written By Diego Macias
We were expecting to hear more about Qualcomm’s best new processor, the Snapdragon 820 today, but it seems less likely now. As it was previously reported, it was just a misunderstanding. It is known that the company has sent samples of that processor to some of the manufacturers of mobile products so that they can test it before their releasing new products. Qualcomm probably would want to release it as soon as they can so that controversies about how their last high-end SoC handled the temperature can be finally forgotten. Still, the Snapdragon processors are a very popular choice among manufacturers to power their devices.
Yesterday, Qualcomm announced an update to their lower-end processors, so they are called Snapdragon 212 and Snapdragon 412. They use the same core types as the ones from last year, the 212 uses Cortex-A7 and the 412 uses Cortex-A53, the only difference between both generations is that the new ones are now clocked at a higher speed. The cores in the 212 now run at 1.3 GHz and the ones in the 412 at 1.4 GHz, also, this processor raises the memory bandwidth to 600 Mhz. While these changes are not very substantial, we could expect a solid yet slightly better performance.
Also, the Snapdragon 616 was announced, bringing this kind of improvements compared to the previous generation, with only one cluster of cores being a little faster. The new mid-range offering is an octa core processor built with a 28nm process and it features an arrangement of two Cortex-A53 cores, one of them clocked at 1.2 GHz instead of 1 GHz as it was on the Snapdragon 615, while the other is clocked at the same 1.7 GHz. Just like in the previous generation, it integrates an X5 LTE Global Mode modem and the Adreno 405 GPU. It has support for QHD displays and camera sensors up to 21 megapixels. It can play videos at a resolution of 1080p at 60 fps and it can capture video at 1080p resolution at 30 fps. Quick Charge 2.0 technology is also supported as well as Miracast for wireless streaming, plus the VIVE 802.11ac 1-stream will bring faster and more efficient Wi-Fi connections.
