Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 450 mobile platform, the latest 400-series SoC for smartphones, at MWC Shanghai 2017. Fabricated using the 14nm FinFET process, the platform promises improved performance and power consumption, while adding support for features that are not typically seen on the budget-friendly 400-series range of chipsets from Qualcomm. The Snapdragon 450 is the successor to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 platform. Notable improvements in the platform include a higher performing CPU and GPU, with a claimed 25 percent increase in performance compared to the Snapdragon 435, largely thanks to the use of the more energy-efficient 14nm fabrication process. Battery life has also been improved, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 comes with support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0, allowing for native fast charging solutions on budget devices. Additional tweaks and upgrades come in the form of faster LTE connectivity, and support for dual-camera setups and real-time bokeh effects in photography.
Snapdragon 450 comes with eight Cortex ARM A53 cores clocked up to 1.8GHz, and fabricated on the 14nm process. The GPU is Adreno 506, with RAM support for the LPDDR3 specification. The SoC additionally supports up to 1080p displays, VoLTE and video capture at up to 1080p at 60fps. Support for dual-camera modules is present, allowing for either two 13-megapixel sensors, or one 21-megapixel sensor, along with edge-to-edge screen displays. ALSO READ:Qualcomm Snapdragon 630, Snapdragon 660 mobile platforms announced: better connectivity, better battery life, camera
Snapdragon 450 is expected to power budget and mid-range smartphones from Q4-2017. The platform is likely to be the SoC of choice for budget smartphones that offer more in the form of power and energy efficiency, as well as for mid-range smartphones that offer better features and technology while looking to the Snapdragon 450 platform for financial viability. Support for features such as dual-camera, Quick Charge 3.0, edge-to-edge display and fast LTE are new to the Snapdragon 400-series platform, and are likely to transform the budget smartphone space in the coming months.
Qualcomm has introduced an upgrade to its fast charging technology. Called Quick Charge 4+, the new standard succeeds the existing Quick Charge 4.0, which was announced last November. As the nomenclature suggests, Quick Charge 4+ doesn’t bring a drastic change but is now much faster and overall more efficient. Qualcomm debuted the new technology on the nubia Z17 smartphone. For now, the nubia smartphone is the only one to come with the new Quick Charge 4+ technology. Qualcomm’s Quick Charge focused on the volatile nature of smartphone batteries and their tendencies to blow up if the parameters are not conducive by even a small margin – a case highlighted by the recent Samsung Galaxy Note 7 disaster. Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+ takes this further and focuses on providing fast cooling to heated batteries at the same time, speeding up the charging process. The new technology comes with three main features: Dual Charge, Intelligent Thermal Balancing, and Advanced Safety Features. The dual charge feature brings a second power management chip in the smartphone which simply cuts the current in half helping the heat to spread easier and the battery to stay cooler for a longer duration. This also helps cut down on charging time. Intelligent Thermal Balancing helps maintain further cool in the battery by completely eliminating current from spots that are heated and redirecting it through cooler areas. The constant alternation helps the battery temperature stay balanced. As a part of advanced safety features, not just the device but even the connector temperature will be monitored and the charging rate modified accordingly. This new technology keeps the battery and the phone up to three degrees cooler and provides 15 percent faster charging. As per nubia Z17, the smartphone can reach from 0 percent to 50 percent charge in just 25 minutes. Additionally, the technology is also 30 percent more efficient than Quick Charge 4. There’s no word on other devices launching with the new technology nor has Qualcomm updated the list. With the second half of 2017 expected to be filled with smartphones – both flagship and budget, there might be more than a few phones with Quick Charge 4+ in the offing. “Accessories such as wall adapters, car chargers, portable battery banks, and USB hubs can also qualify for Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+ designation. Such an accessory will include backward compatibility with Quick Charge 3.0 and Quick Charge 2.0. Having a 4+ certified accessory will help ensure that your existing Quick Charge 3.0 and 2.0 enabled devices will work with the latest commercially available adapters,” Qualcomm elaborates on its website.
Qualcomm has announced two new chipsets targeted at the mid-range segment of smartphones. The new chipsets – Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630 – are aimed at bringing flagship-level performance to mid-range segment. The Snapdragon 660 is available starting from now whereas Snapdragon 630 will be available from May-end. Devices running the new Snapdragon chipsets will be announced from June while the devices will be available in the third quarter. According to Qualcomm, Snapdragon 660 is the successor to Qualcomm’s 653 series. The latest chipset is based on 14nm process and uses Kryo 260 cores, which is a first for Qualcomm. It has Adreno 512 GPU, which is an upgrade over Adreno 510 on Snapdragon 653 SoC. Qualcomm says it brings 30 percent improvement, allowing better and multimedia experience. The chipset includes X12 LTE modem and connectivity options such as Bluetooth 5.0, USB Type-C. It has Quick Charge 4 support. Snapdragon 630 is also based on the 14nm process. It uses octa-core ARM Cortex A53 cores at 2.2GHz clock speed. The chipset features X12 LTE modem, Bluetooth 5 and USB Type-C and Quick Charge 4 support. The two chipsets come with 8GB maximum memory and Vulkan API support. The Snapdragon 660 Mobile Platform supports displays up to QHD (2K) resolution, whereas the 630 supports FHD/QXGA (1080p). Dual-rear camera setups Over the past couple of years, dual camera setups have been catching up the pace. Some smartphones use one camera to capture photos and the other to capture depth information, and thus adding DSLR-like bokeh effects to your photos. There are other smartphones that use standard camera for clicking photos, and a telephoto lens for 2X optical zoom. Then, there is a combination of monochrome and RGB (color) sensors for capturing good photos in day-light and low-light. To make it easier for manufacturers Qualcomm has included Spectra 160 ISP (image signal processing) that could improve image quality for more natural skin tones, better low-light photography and improve power efficiency when using dual camera modules. The Snapdragon 630 SoC supports two 13-megapixel dual camera setup, whereas the Snapdragon 660 SoC supports up to two 16-megapixel dual camera setup. Both chipsets also support 4K video recording and playback at 30fps. Machine Learning
So far, machine Learning has been a part of top-end chipset, but now Qualcomm has introduced it on mid-tier chipsets too. At its event in Singapore, Qualcomm did offer a small demo as to how it works. Having four objects on the table, and using the smartphone camera with machine learning software algorithms, it can detect all four objects. The phone automatically uses GPU to process the data. Both chipsets support Neural Processing Engine SDK allowing manufacturers and developers to make use of machine learning to power immersive and engaging user experiences.
Vulkan API for smooth gaming experience
Gaming performance has always been smooth on high-end smartphones, but mid-range smartphones often struggle when running graphics intense games. Qualcomm is changing that by including support for Vulkan API on the Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630 SoCs. It supports latest 3D graphics APIs with resolution of up to 1920×1200 pixels. With support for multi-threading, the games built on Vulkan API will be efficiently able to use smartphone’s resources and ensure smooth running.
Quick Charge 4.0
New smartphone are now coming with larger batteries and that also calls for a need to fast charging feature. First introduced with Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm is also bringing Quick Charge 4.0 fast charging technology to Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630 SoCs. Qualcomm claims even five minutes of charging can offer up to five hours of battery life. What’s more, with support for USB Type-C, Quick Charge 4.0 can charge the smartphone battery 20 percent faster. Connectivity
Both chipsets also support Bluetooth 5.0 which offers double speed and four times more range compared to the Bluetooth 4.2. The new connectivity standard also increases the connectionless data broadcast capacity by eight times. Support for aptX codec is also included on the chipset for better audio listening experience via Bluetooth. The Snapdragon 630 and Snapdragon 660 feature Snapdragon X12 LTE Modem, paired with the new SDR660 RF transceiver, which support peak downlink data rates of 600Mbps to the 600-tier line-up of SOCs for the first time. “OEMs and developers can also power immersive and engaging user experiences with machine learning on the Snapdragon 660 and 630 Mobile Platforms using the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK. This heterogeneous software framework offers support for Caffe/Caffe2 and TensorFlow, making it easy to target and run neural networks on the Snapdragon core that matches the power and performance profile of the desired feature – CPU, GPU or DSP/HVX,” explained Qualcomm in a press release. Earlier, Qualcomm announced some figures for mobile phone user base in Asia with special emphasis on South East Asia and India. According to Qualcomm, there are more than 450 million 3G and 4G users in South East Asia, and it predicts the figures to grow to 730 million by 2020. For India, Qualcomm said that the country is securely positioned to become the second largest mobile market. “India is a high scale environment. It has more than 1.1 billion total mobile connections, more than 500 million unique connections,” said Larry Paulson of Qualcomm. Qualcomm estimates India to soon have more than 1 billion unique subscribers. “Internet has become like oxygen. India has about 400 million internet connections and about 80 percent of internet traffic in India comes from mobile. Going forward, only way to reach mass connections is wireless,” added Paulson.
Qualcomm has announced that the company is launching a new virtual reality development kit (VRDK) for its Snapdragon 835 mobile platform, which gives developers early access to a VR head mounted display or VR headset built with the aforementioned processor. The company has also launched its Head Mounted Display Accelerator Program meant for original equipment manufacturers of virtual reality hardware. Talking first about the virtual reality development kit, the head mounted display that comes with the kit sports a 4-megapixel WQHD (2560x1440) AMOLED display (two megapixels per eye). It features six degrees of freedom (6DoF) motion tracking with two monochromatic, one mega pixel (1280x800) global shutter cameras. The head mounted display comes with inertial measurement unit with fast interface Snapdragon 835 integrated sensor core, the company said in its release. The Snapdragon 835 VRDK's head mounted display packs 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and in terms of connectivity options, it offers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB 3.1 type C. There is also a trackpad located on the right side of the VR headset. "With this new VRDK, we're providing virtual reality application developers with advanced tools and technologies to accelerate a new generation of VR games, 360-degree VR videos and a variety of interactive education, enterprise, healthcare and entertainment applications," Cristiano Amon, executive vice president at Qualcomm Technologies, was quoted as saying in the release. The virtual reality development kit is expected to be made available in Q2 2017 through Qualcomm Developer Network. Moving to the Qualcomm's Head Mounted Display Accelerator Program, the initiative aims to help virtual reality hardware manufacturers "reduce engineering costs, decrease the time it takes to create and ship new products, and provide means for OEMs to validate performance metrics," the company said in a separate release. With this accelerator program, hardware manufacturers will get access to reference designs and they can choose from a pre-qualified set of components. Manufacturers can choose to build their own head mounted displays from the reference designs or can take the help from turnkey original design manufacturers like Goertek or Thundercomm to modify the Snapdragon 835 powered headset to suit their requirements. "VR tracking software from technology leaders like Leap Motion and SMI has also been pre-optimized on the Snapdragon 835 VR HMD to accelerate time to development," Qualcomm said. The accelerator program further includes pre-defined quality metrics and methods of testing, accessories, and more. Qualcomm's accelerator program is already open for the hardware developers.
