Snapdragon 653

Let’s start with the fastest of them. The Snapdragon 653 is an updated version of Snapdragon 652. These two chips are pin and software compatible, which means that any phone designed today with Snapdragon 652 will easily integrate the Snapdragon 653. Let me also mention that Snapdragon 650, 652 and 653 are all pin and software compatible.

The new chip supports a few important features that will drive the phone sales in the mainstream of 2017. The Snapdragon 653 has Snapdragon X9 Cat 7 modem with 300 Mbps downlink speeds and 150 Mbps uplink speeds, dual cameras, and supports 8GB of RAM. This is what you will see in mainstream phones in early 2017.

The new Snapdragon 653 is 10 percent faster than the 652, as the four Cortex A72 core speeds have increased from 1.8GHz to 1.95GHz. This is still an eight core, 28nm chip and the GPU has also received a 10 percent performance increase.

Snapdragon 626

The second chip in the line-up is called Snapdragon 626, a replacement for the Snapdragon 625 which is a 14nm eight core SoC. This chip incorporates the same eight Cortex A53 cores again but is 10 percent faster than the current 2GHz design.

The new chip also supports dual cameras, something that we will obviously see in many phones next year, as well as Qualcomm's TruSignal antenna boost technology, which was first introduced with the Snapdragon 820. Of course, the chip also got updated to the Snapdragon X9 LTE Cat 7 modem too. The Snapdragon 626 and 625 are pin and software compatible, and these two chips are software compatible with the Snapdragon 425, 427, 430 and 435. This will lead to a faster phone development in the mainstream market.

Christiano Amon, the Executive Vice president of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., has said that the Snapdragon 626 and 653 are available today, while the Snapdragon 427 will ship to partners in January 2017.

Snapdragon 427

The last to launch is the Snapdragon 427, a new updated 400 series processor. This is another 28nm LP eight core chip with eight Cortex A53 chips again 10 percent faster than 1.4 GHz Snapdragon 415 chip.

The new Snapdragon 427 is pin and software compatible with Snapdragon 425, 430 and 435 and software compatible with the Snapdragon 625 and 626. Essentially all these processors are based on differently clocked Cortex A53 eight core chips.

The Snapdragon 427 has the updated X9 Cat 7 modem and now uses an integrated DSP that will lower power consumption in the sensor area and during some basic tasks such as listening to music. The new SoC also supports the TruSignal antenna boost feature as well.

Kedar Kondap, Sr. Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, mentioned during his presentation that there are 400 design wins in the 600 / 400 series market, which is a much higher number than the 150 designs on Snapdragon 820 / 821 that were mentioned a few times.

If Qualcomm’s OEM partners follow up with QRD (Qualcomm Reference Design) guidelines, they can come up with a design in less than 60 days to market. Kedar has mentioned that you need to stay within the modem guidelines to keep within the QRD reference guidelines.

So you can expects a lot entry-level and mainstream phones to come with these chips and put some additional pressure on MediaTek and other players in this market.