Good to see this combo going down in price. The adreno 506 is a very powerful GPU, and I'm glad to see the entry level being brought up so high. Seeing as how A53 offers performance on par with much higher clocked Kraits, and slightly lower clocked A15s then this is just awesome. Coincidentally clock for clock they come pretty close to early Core 2 duo CPUs. Good for everyone!
Pretty transparent rebrand / neutering of the 625. Creating a whole new chipset with such similar specifications would be an odd move, so this makes sense. I do wonder why they felt the need to gimp the video encode capabilities though. Yayyy product segmentation.
Why is a "midrange"/lower-end chipset still packing 8 slow cores? I really hope that this disastrous "more cores is better" arms race will backpedal at some point, as the very high pixel-count sensors have rolled back from ~20MP back down to a more reasonable 12MP for such small sensors.
Are 8 cores perceptibly better in usage than 4 cores? I really doubt it. This could have easily been a quad or maybe even a dual-core and outside of multi-thread CPU benchmarks, nobody would've noticed. As much as dislike Apple, they are the only ones in the mobile space that don't participate in the superficial spec arms race (core counts, screen res, camera megapixels) and in this case they are still wiping the floor on the SoC front with "only" 2 fast cores+2 slow cores. That is what a mid-range SoCs should be, IMO. More cores can be labelled high-end to appease the benchmarkers, but the low and mid-end segments would be much better served by trading core count for better IPC, or even the slight efficiency improvements of not having these vestigial extra cores.
Because being an average Android handset vendor these days = lousy profit margins. Can't use the much better SD660 SoC for the lower end because that would cannibalize their already tiny volume flagship segment.
At least in my Snapdragon 430 handset even Facebook put uniform load in at least 6 cores, only emulators and old games(before 2014) uses 4 cores or less
Companys doesn't use A73 or A57 cores in midrange or entry level SoCs for 2 reasons: 1- Low efficiency, raw A57 cores are too hot, A72 and A73 are just a little better in this regard than A57, and custom cores are too expensive 2 - lower lithography process would be the solution to put like a dual A73 + dual 35 in a "Snap 465", but it is again too expensive and too low amount produced for midrange SoCs...
Quite saddening to see still no signs of UFS storage support in the 4xx and 6xx series. Dear Qualcomm, we need faster storage, because that's the key component which slows down horribly in every segment of phone...
Qualcomm's A53 cores in 430 to 626 are the best per-clock performance A53 cores in the market, early A53 CPUs lile MT 6735 and Snapdragon 410 havê around 40% less per-clock performance and cannot be used in midrange phones, but newer A53 cores are not that bar, and Android apps are getting very well optmised for large core numbers, to put in perspective: an Snapdragon 626 scores around 5350-5600 points in geekbench 3 (a benchmark that run the same tests in any system) a Core 2 Quad Q6600 scores around 4500 points, a Kaby-Lake Dual Core Desktop Celeron/Pentium(w/o HT) scores around 5500-6000... ~5500 is not that bar for a 2.5W midrange smartphone CPU... i think the major problems with entry level - midrange SoCs are low memory bandwidth and por GPU(Adreno 506 is comparable to intel HD Graphics 2500)
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Wardrive86 - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Good to see this combo going down in price. The adreno 506 is a very powerful GPU, and I'm glad to see the entry level being brought up so high. Seeing as how A53 offers performance on par with much higher clocked Kraits, and slightly lower clocked A15s then this is just awesome. Coincidentally clock for clock they come pretty close to early Core 2 duo CPUs. Good for everyone!jjj - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
A rebrand seems more likely here., the 630 replaces the 625 so they might as well do this.Spunjji - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Pretty transparent rebrand / neutering of the 625. Creating a whole new chipset with such similar specifications would be an odd move, so this makes sense. I do wonder why they felt the need to gimp the video encode capabilities though. Yayyy product segmentation.StrangerGuy - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
It's already disturbing about how "new" phones with A53-only cores are rapidly approaching prices of "old" SD820 former flagships.jimjamjamie - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
"Midrange"ok then
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Officially, the company considers the 200 to be entry-level, with the 800 and 600 being distinctly flagship and high-end, respectively.http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/5709/snapdra...
That said, for the US market where you won't see the 200, the 400 is functionally an entry-level SoC.
hybrid2d4x4 - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Why is a "midrange"/lower-end chipset still packing 8 slow cores? I really hope that this disastrous "more cores is better" arms race will backpedal at some point, as the very high pixel-count sensors have rolled back from ~20MP back down to a more reasonable 12MP for such small sensors.Are 8 cores perceptibly better in usage than 4 cores? I really doubt it. This could have easily been a quad or maybe even a dual-core and outside of multi-thread CPU benchmarks, nobody would've noticed. As much as dislike Apple, they are the only ones in the mobile space that don't participate in the superficial spec arms race (core counts, screen res, camera megapixels) and in this case they are still wiping the floor on the SoC front with "only" 2 fast cores+2 slow cores. That is what a mid-range SoCs should be, IMO. More cores can be labelled high-end to appease the benchmarkers, but the low and mid-end segments would be much better served by trading core count for better IPC, or even the slight efficiency improvements of not having these vestigial extra cores.
StrangerGuy - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Because being an average Android handset vendor these days = lousy profit margins. Can't use the much better SD660 SoC for the lower end because that would cannibalize their already tiny volume flagship segment.Valis - Sunday, July 2, 2017 - link
SD660 is one of the best mid-range SoCs right now, it has good CPU, decent GPU and doesn't consume much either. =)Ajr2017 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
At least in my Snapdragon 430 handset even Facebook put uniform load in at least 6 cores, only emulators and old games(before 2014) uses 4 cores or lessAjr2017 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Companys doesn't use A73 or A57 cores in midrange or entry level SoCs for 2 reasons:1- Low efficiency, raw A57 cores are too hot, A72 and A73 are just a little better in this regard than A57,
and custom cores are too expensive
2 - lower lithography process would be the solution to put like a dual A73 + dual 35 in a "Snap 465", but it is again too expensive and too low amount produced for midrange SoCs...
prateekprakash - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
Quite saddening to see still no signs of UFS storage support in the 4xx and 6xx series.Dear Qualcomm, we need faster storage, because that's the key component which slows down horribly in every segment of phone...
haukionkannel - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link
They want to keep faster storage for higher end phones... market segmenting...jjj - Thursday, June 29, 2017 - link
SD630 has DDR4 and UFS supportwilbertthompson305 - Thursday, August 3, 2017 - link
Nice article pure informative and knowledgeable thank you for sharing it. Click here for Vidmate updates http://vidmatedownloadforpc.com/Ajr2017 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Qualcomm's A53 cores in 430 to 626 are the best per-clock performance A53 cores in the market, early A53 CPUs lile MT 6735 and Snapdragon 410 havê around 40% less per-clock performance and cannot be used in midrange phones, but newer A53 cores are not that bar, and Android apps are getting very well optmised for large core numbers, to put in perspective: an Snapdragon 626 scores around 5350-5600 points in geekbench 3 (a benchmark that run the same tests in any system) a Core 2 Quad Q6600 scores around 4500 points, a Kaby-Lake Dual Core Desktop Celeron/Pentium(w/o HT) scores around 5500-6000... ~5500 is not that bar for a 2.5W midrange smartphone CPU... i think the major problems with entry level - midrange SoCs are low memory bandwidth and por GPU(Adreno 506 is comparable to intel HD Graphics 2500)Hitesh12 - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
What is the point of this SoC when 625 exists?