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Qualcomm's New Chips: A MediaTek Equalizer?

Majeed Ahmad

New member
Cellular chip powerhouse Qualcomm has today unveiled four new Snapdragon processors: 415, 425, 618 and 620. Snapdragon 415 chip will be available in June 2015 while other chips will be launched by the year-end. It's interesting to note that these mobile chips have many of the features that are found in Snapdragon 800 line housed in premier Android phones like Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8.

Snapdragon 425, 618 and 620 processors feature X8 LTE modem that will allow handsets to achieve download speeds of up to 300 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 100 Mbps. Moreover, Snapdragon 618 and 620 processors feature ARM's latest A-72 cores to boost performance and power efficiency. That's a lot of horsepower for mid-range smartphones.

View attachment 13338
Snapdragon 618 processor​

Qualcomm's patent battle in China has recently attracted a lot of press coverage. But probably a far bigger challenge for Qualcomm is brewing in the form of MediaTek, the chipmaker dominating the market for low- to mid-range smartphones. While MediaTek has started to eye top-of-the-line smartphones with more powerful SoCs, it's about time that Qualcomm aims for MediaTek's territory.
 
The 618 and 620 are both built at 28nm HP (like the 80X), a very reliable and high performance node.
I think that the 620 will be very close to the 810 in terms of performance. At this point, I wonder if the 820 will be a 14nm FinFET SoC. In this case, 20nm is really going to be a transition node.

View attachment 13341
 
I have seen some people commenting that Qualcomm are moving to Samsung for these new parts as TSMC will not have 16FF ready this year. Anyone hearing anything like this coming out of Taiwan?
 
I have seen some people commenting that Qualcomm are moving to Samsung for these new parts as TSMC will not have 16FF ready this year. Anyone hearing anything like this coming out of Taiwan?
The SoCs mentioned on the first post are built at 28nm (more foundries involved). If you are talking about the upcoming 818 and 820, yes, that's the current rumor (Samsung 14nm), but just a rumor so far.
 
According to ARM's roadmap, Cortex A-72 chips will have 16nm nodes in 2016, while Qualcomm is planning to release Snapdragon 618 and 620 chips (based on A-72 CPU cores) in end-2015. However, it's too close to ARM's A-72/16nm 2016 timeline.

It will probably be clear in the coming days. Stay tuned.
 
Gobi -- Lost in Translation

An important annoucement almost got missed in yesterday's Qualcomm's launch. The Gobi brand for the company's standalone LTE modem chips will be abondoned and will be merged into the Snapdragon brand.

View attachment 13355

Gobi modem chips have been used in cars, laptops and iPhones (Apple has been using its own application processor while buying modem chips from Qualcomm). Now Qualcomm will supply both SoCs (baseband + application processor) and baseband chips under the Snapdragon brand.
 
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Gobi -- Lost in Translation

An important annoucement almost got missed in yesterday's Qualcomm's launch. The Gobi brand for the company's standalone LTE modem chips will be abondoned and will be merged into the Snapdragon brand.

View attachment 13355

Gobi modem chips have been used in cars, laptops and iPhones (Apple has been using its own application processor while buying modem chips from Qualcomm). Now Qualcomm will supply both SoCs (baseband + application processor) and baseband chips under the Snapdragon brand.

My semiwiki piece on Gobi is here.
 
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