Qualcomm today announced the first member of its Snapdragon 700 processor family, the Snapdragon 710. The chip aims to power up high-midrange smartphones, primarily in China. It's also a bet against a trade war shutting down US-China tech cooperation.
The world's top mobile chipset company, Qualcomm sells chips in four tiers. The 200 series go into low-end products, typically costing $100 or less, the 400s and 600s appear in midrange devices, and the 800s go into flagships. But a bit of a price gap has opened up, where we're seeing 600-series chips in $300-$400 phones like the Moto G6 Plus, but most Snapdragon 845 phones cost over $600.
"The OEMs wanted the ability to scale the higher-tier 600s into a different tier for a richer user experience," said Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm's VP of product management.
The market abhors a vacuum, so here comes the Snapdragon 710, with a whole lot of 800-ish components. Start with the CPU: Kondap says the Kryo 360 has the same basic core architecture as the Snapdragon 845's Kryo 385, but a different arrangement of cores (two 2.2GHz performance cores and six 1.7GHz efficiency cores; the Kryo 285 has four 2.8GHz performance cores and four efficiency cores.) The new Spectra 250 ISP supports dual 20MP cameras and multi-camera modules for 3D AR imaging and face verification, as well as 4K HDR video playback.
The new X15 modem is designed to be ... well, not quite as good as the X16 included with the Snapdragon 835, but better than the X12 sold with the 600 series. The X15 is an "800Mbps" LTE modem, which supports two carriers with 4x4 MIMO, or one 4x4 and two 2x2 with a maximum of three carriers aggregated. That's still very good. The Snapdragon X12 only supports 4x4 on one carrier, with a maximum speed of "600Mbps."
The Adreno 616 GPU in the Snapdragon 710 has "up to 35 percent faster graphics rendering" than the GPU in the 600-series chips. The whole setup uses 20-40 percent less power in demanding applications than the 600 series chips did.
This could all make for some powerful $400 phones.
Not Just About Tech
When the Snapdragon 700 series was first announced in February, Qualcomm said it was primarily destined for China, where the $400-$600 smartphone segment is hot. Kondap agreed: "a lot of the Chinese OEMs asked us for the 700 tiers," he said.
I'd love this story to be just about new chipsets. But Qualcomm is another football in the ongoing game between the US and China on trade right now. Qualcomm has said that half its sales are in China, but the US recently banned giant Chinese phonemaker ZTE from using any Qualcomm products. Qualcomm's acquisition of chipmarker NXP is also currently being held up by Chinese regulators.
The Snapdragon 700 helps Qualcomm compete with Taiwanese "fast follower" Mediatek, which also sells high-midrange chips for slightly less than Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 series costs. But its efforts will be for naught if its potential Chinese customers are scared away by political instability.
The first Snapdragon 710 phones will come out by the end of June, Kondap said.