While it sucks that we still have to wait an unspecified amount of time for a Snapdragon 820 unveiling, Qualcomm is giving us some smaller unveilings to snack on in the meantime. Earlier today the company announced the Snapdragon 212, 412, and 616, three slightly improved versions of last year’s low-end SoCs. These announcements aren’t really going to satiate anyone who’s waiting for the Snapdragon 820, but at least its something.
While most of us wait (im)patiently for the Snapdragon 820’s (hopefully) impending announcement, Qualcomm has actually quietly released improved versions of the its lower-end Snapdragon family with the arrival of the Snapdragon 212, 412, and 616. On the lowest end of the spectrum we have the Snapdragon 212 and 412, with the chips based on Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A53 respectively. These are the exact same core types as last year, though they have been sped up. The Snapdragon 212 cores have gone from 1.1 to 1.3GHz, and the Snapdragon 412 cores were raised from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz. Additionally, the Snapdragon 412 also sees memory bandwidth rise from 533MHz to 600Mhz. All other features from the Snapdragon 212 and Snapdragon 412 remain the same as we saw in the previous generation. Lastly we have the Snapdragon 616, an octa-core processor with two different clusters of Cortex-A53 cores. The higher speed cores run at 1.7GHz, with the low-power set coming in at 1.2GHz.
