Qualcomm’s custom Krait cores made quite a bang earlier this year, as they offered vastly superior performance compared to vanilla A9 cores and even today, with A15-based products slowly starting to trickle down to consumers, Krait-based dual- and quad-core SoCs are competitive as ever.

However, Qualcomm won’t use custom cores in low-end SoCs. In an interview with the Taipei Times, Qualcomm exec James Shen said the company plans to continue using custom cores in high-end chips, but in cheaper chipsets Qualcomm will just use plain ARM cores.

“When quad-core chipsets become popular, those chipsets will be very similar to each other,” said Shen. “Consumers, in fact, are not concerned about what kind of chipsets [are used in their phones]. Instead, they are more concerned about which brands are used in those electronics [products], and they are more concerned about the overall performance of the chipsets.”

Qualcomm recently introduced two A7-based quad-core SoCs, designed specifically for the Chinese market, and MediaTek followed up with a similar design of its own.

Basically Qualcomm will use custom cores to grow its brand in the high-end and differentiate from other outfits, but in the low end its chips will be just as dull as everyone else’s.

More here.