Sounds like the typical over-extension mature companies do to squeeze more money out of their customers (why negotiate down the 800-series with OEMs that can't afford the 800's high price, when you could sell them on the lower-cost - for Qualcomm - 700-series instead...etc).
Considering how essentially no phones of any relevance have used the higher end 600-series chips, I'd say this is a good move. Flagship parts stat flagship parts, while really good bon-flagship parts get more attractive branding. It's reasonable to assume that the price difference is significant enough that these parts don't actually compete.
It's hard to see how this is bad for customers. "Squeezing more money out of customers" sounds bad, but here, they're offering a wider variety of products so that customers can obtain that product whose price:performance ratio is closest to their personal preferences.
Of course, if the 700-series is just a renamed 600-series, then it won't make as much of a difference. But it might make devices more transparent to consumers, and thus, less costly in terms of information. It will be easier for a customer to distinguish between low, medium, and high if the products are 600, 700, and 800 rather than low-600, high-600, and 800.
Splitting the 600 series does make sense. Since snapdragon 650 and 625, there has been significant difference in performance between the two subtiers. And they will pretty much end with numbers after 640 if they dont change names
Agreed. Can't help but think this has been part of the reason for the abysmal adoption rates of the higher end 600-series chips, some of which have been very attractive.
So they rename the 670 and you buy the new tier BS? Go to print with no info, just marketing garbage. Interesting that, at the same time, the P60 launch was ignored by AT.
Whilst I'm not saying you're wrong (my understanding of what processes in Android use a GPU is too limited to make that determination), there are some people like me who don't game on their phones. I want performance for day to day tasks and I want to be able to edit photos quickly but I'll rarely if ever run a 3D game. Is Mediatek fulfilling this niche in the market or is a decent GPU integral to not bottlenecking other tasks, for example rendering a complex webpage or PDF? I always end up buying a flagship phone because I use the damn thing for almost every part of my life and so it's a good investment but if I could do the same as what I do with a laptop, for example (good CPU, lots of RAM, nice screen, shoddy integrated graphics) and save myself some cash, I'd be pretty happy to do that as long as it didn't compromise other areas of performance.
Is this reasonable with a phone or am I being old fashioned and looking at functions being split whereas these days general processing tasks suited to use of the GPU architecture will be sent there rather than to the main CPU cores?
I'm not sure, but to me all this "moar GPU" talk looks like typical geeks chasing higher numbers and maybe games. Even for games I'd question the need for massive GPU power. I've seen statements like "the screen resolution has increased, so we need much more GPU power to push those pixels". Well, with those massive PPI numbers it's impossible to see individual pixels anyway, unless you hold the device 5 cm away from your eye, so why bother putting massive hardware behind "rendering natively" when this is just for some game?
Build the premium hardware for people who want to game, but don't forget about the ones who don't or who'd be fine with a casual game at reduced resolution.
Mediatek uses crappy, inefficient GPUs even in their high end chips. Their power efficiency efforts are also way behind Qualcomm. They're also serial GPL violators.
I'd rather use a clay tablet with a wooden stick than to ever use a Mediatek device again.
To add salt to the wound, an Anandtech review of the Redmi Note 4 with an X25 showed 20-30% *less* battery life compared to a Note 3 Pro with a Snapdragon 650, with similar performance and using similarly-sized battery packs. HiSilicon has already leapfrogged Mediatek so they're stuck with the low end market.
Yeah I don't care about GPU performance either. If having a lower power GPU gives me another 6 hours battery I'll take it. Gaming on a phone isn't for me.
There was a split in 600 performance. Imagine nvidia 1070 performance (forget any Ti version). If you were forced to, would you lump it with a 1080 or a 1060? Or if already lumped in with a 1060, wouldn't it make sense to split it (if price and performance was already different)?
Earlier this year there whose a rumor of S670 to get a A6xx GPU that's 3/4 sized of a current flagship with 4 A75's and 4 A55's... Now newer leaks suggest S670 will be A6xx GPU half sized from flag one on S845 & 2x A75's 6x A55's. My guess is that QC made renaming & the earlier belief leak supposed to be S670 will indeed be the first representative of the S7xx series.
Quite possible. There's no reason the rebranding should come with a price hike, so if this means we'll see the line of chips previously known as the Snapdragon >650 line in some actual shipping hardware from serious brands, I'm all for it. 80-90% of flagship performance in somewhat above-midrange phones? Yes please.
The last time 65x chips were used widely was Xiaomi used the 650/652 in the Redmi Note 3 and Mi Max. $150-200 for 80% of flagship performance was insane. It's telling that the successors to both models used a cheaper, slower 625.
It could be that the 65x devices got too close to flagship performance at half the price. The 660 and 670 chips look likely to repeat the same scenario, providing almost flagship performance for midrange or even budget prices. Maybe Qualcomm want to move these towards 700 branding so they and OEMs can charge higher prices.
Yes. I also think this is likely. As an aside I've been looking to get a new phone soon. I've got a Oneplus One. It's over 4 years old now. I'd been thinking about the Moto G6 Plus because there were rumors it was going to use the SD660. Now I'm thinking it's either going to be a new Nokia 6 Plus or the Oneplus 5T. The nokia uses the 660 and the 5T uses the 835. I'd be happy with either.
The Mi Max 3 is supposed to use a 660 with a bigger 18:9 7" display and a monster 5500 mAh battery pack. I don't think anyone else has those specs on a budget model.
The 660 is basically a 14nm version of the 652 so it should be screaming fast and still efficient. A 670 with A55 and A75 cores would be nice but that's only just been announced, so shipping devices could be a year away.
Last time Xiaomi had competition, now QC has multiple competition coming from both MTK & Samsung. While new MTK P offering seams charming real threat is last years big miss the X30 that MTK is now selling with a big discount. This year will be much more interesting regarding SoC's.
Mediatek need to be more open with GPL licensing and they need more efficient designs. The X20 in the Redmi Note 4 has 4x+4x A53 and 2x A72; the 650 in the Redmi Note 3 Pro has 4x A53 and 2x A72, yet the older phone is both more efficient and has higher performance.
A decacore chip is a bit of a joke... I know because I was a longtime user of the original Redmi Note with the MT6592's 8x A7 and that was maddeningly slow compared to a Snapdragon 410 with 4x A7.
To put it simple; their will be a price hike compared to the current 14nm S6xx offering as it will be both 10 nm and with 33% bigger GPU which account for about 20~25% of whole SoC. S650/652/653 ware cheap thanks to old planar 28 nm lithography. It's possible to do it again with FD-SOI but none of the vendor's is even trying to do it. 22nm FD-SOI is able to out match the 10nm FinFET regarding power consumption if it's used with back biosing and as the both front and back end for both digital, RF and mixed block's wile retaining frequencies used in the midrange SoC's.
The 65x series was a crazy idea, using an old process with new architecture to get a speedy chip at lower cost. If an old 28nm chip is almost as good as a 14nm flagship...
I think it all comes down to sales and marketing. Intel and Qualcomm behave similarly, they put financial considerations above technical ones. Qualcomm would make less money making a load of 66x or 67x chips on 22nm compared to pushing 84x on 10nm.
no matter what likely it will be using too many cpu cores etc, strapped into a stupid easy to break mostly glass type "smartphone" that chews through its battery life more then it should.
New and modern is a good thing, but not when it comes at the cost of durability day to day functionality and the privilege of paying more than one should for something that is engineered to fail in many ways.
"paper thin, half the weight 8 cores, a battery that lasts half as long as it should because we do not bother to test the OS, we removed the headphone jack because of some BS reasoning, we cram as many pixels as possible into the screen even when we did not need to do this, say hello to the new for 20xx model Y phone..get it today while you still have money in your wallet"
I would love it if they'd have a series of SoCs that pair a pair of wide/fast cores with a pair of efficient cores to bring good quads to the mid-range devices, and leave the octa- and beyond versions for flagships. It pisses me off to see 8 slow A53 cores in the mid-range devices as if that's actually better in any usage scenario outside of MT benchmarks than a quad A53 or even dual A7x series.
So... You want the Snapdragon 820/821? Kidding aside, outside of Samsung's new M3 cores, there are no ARM cores outside of Apple wide enough to make a layout like this a good choice at the moment, as you'd end up needing all cores active pretty much all the time. I agree that the concept is far superior, though. No use in stuffing eight crappy cores in there when ST performance is your biggest weakness.
Yes, in essence I want the SD 820/821 formula to be applied to the mid-range with current cores/mfg process. Aside from that 650 that appeared in almost no devices and was on an old 28nm process, it's either: you get a flagship or get a POS SoC, with no real mid-range.
The weird thing is that in most daily usage, a 8x A53 chip like the 625 performs similarly to a 4x A53 like the 650. The 625 also gains an edge in efficiency due to the smaller process node. Android now gobbles up as many cores as it can, it's only intermittent tasks like web page rendering and app loading that benefit from big A72 cores.
That being said, it's great to have those big cores when needed. My Mi Max with a 650 shows almost no jank and web page rendering is restricted more by network speeds.
Put it to unofficial LineageOS by nijel8 and me & use my performance script & you will feel even more performance benefits in Chrome and similar heavy tasks while having a much better efficiency in general medium to lite use. ;)
I have to reluctantly agree with you there. The 625 really is good enough for most people and most tasks that fast cores like the A72 are a luxury, not a need. The mobile market is ruled by a good-enough mentality so it's likely that OEMs and consumers will gravitate towards cheaper 62x and 63x chips, leaving the 66x or 7xx high and dry. Again.
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Krysto - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Snapdragon 500, 300, and 100-series coming soon.Sounds like the typical over-extension mature companies do to squeeze more money out of their customers (why negotiate down the 800-series with OEMs that can't afford the 800's high price, when you could sell them on the lower-cost - for Qualcomm - 700-series instead...etc).
Valantar - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Considering how essentially no phones of any relevance have used the higher end 600-series chips, I'd say this is a good move. Flagship parts stat flagship parts, while really good bon-flagship parts get more attractive branding. It's reasonable to assume that the price difference is significant enough that these parts don't actually compete.Mikewind Dale - Thursday, March 1, 2018 - link
It's hard to see how this is bad for customers. "Squeezing more money out of customers" sounds bad, but here, they're offering a wider variety of products so that customers can obtain that product whose price:performance ratio is closest to their personal preferences.Of course, if the 700-series is just a renamed 600-series, then it won't make as much of a difference. But it might make devices more transparent to consumers, and thus, less costly in terms of information. It will be easier for a customer to distinguish between low, medium, and high if the products are 600, 700, and 800 rather than low-600, high-600, and 800.
SirPerro - Friday, March 2, 2018 - link
To be honest, I think this makes a lot of sense and clears up the confusion.SD636 and SD660 are in the same tier, in theory, but they are in a completely different league.
I'm fine with the successors being named SD6xx and SD7xx. That'd be much more clear.
The same way, SD205 (Dual core) successor could be SD1xx and SD212 (Quad core) successor remain SD2xx
And yes, the future SD460 could be SD5xx and leave the SD4xx for the SD435 successor
Those 8 tiers DO exist in practice, and the naming would be MUCH simpler that way
SirPerro - Friday, March 2, 2018 - link
And I just realized I'm missing the tier 3... I guess they need to fill the gap with something lollevizx - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
That's ridiculous. 660 and 636 are identical chips with different frequency. How are they not the same league?636 and 630 are not the same league.
leo_sk - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Splitting the 600 series does make sense. Since snapdragon 650 and 625, there has been significant difference in performance between the two subtiers. And they will pretty much end with numbers after 640 if they dont change namesValantar - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Agreed. Can't help but think this has been part of the reason for the abysmal adoption rates of the higher end 600-series chips, some of which have been very attractive.MrSpadge - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
+1jjj - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
So they rename the 670 and you buy the new tier BS? Go to print with no info, just marketing garbage.Interesting that, at the same time, the P60 launch was ignored by AT.
Adityaseven7 - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Mediatek should be ignored by everybody till they stop using entry level gpus in their flagship socsphilehidiot - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Whilst I'm not saying you're wrong (my understanding of what processes in Android use a GPU is too limited to make that determination), there are some people like me who don't game on their phones. I want performance for day to day tasks and I want to be able to edit photos quickly but I'll rarely if ever run a 3D game. Is Mediatek fulfilling this niche in the market or is a decent GPU integral to not bottlenecking other tasks, for example rendering a complex webpage or PDF? I always end up buying a flagship phone because I use the damn thing for almost every part of my life and so it's a good investment but if I could do the same as what I do with a laptop, for example (good CPU, lots of RAM, nice screen, shoddy integrated graphics) and save myself some cash, I'd be pretty happy to do that as long as it didn't compromise other areas of performance.Is this reasonable with a phone or am I being old fashioned and looking at functions being split whereas these days general processing tasks suited to use of the GPU architecture will be sent there rather than to the main CPU cores?
MrSpadge - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
I'm not sure, but to me all this "moar GPU" talk looks like typical geeks chasing higher numbers and maybe games. Even for games I'd question the need for massive GPU power. I've seen statements like "the screen resolution has increased, so we need much more GPU power to push those pixels". Well, with those massive PPI numbers it's impossible to see individual pixels anyway, unless you hold the device 5 cm away from your eye, so why bother putting massive hardware behind "rendering natively" when this is just for some game?Build the premium hardware for people who want to game, but don't forget about the ones who don't or who'd be fine with a casual game at reduced resolution.
serendip - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Mediatek uses crappy, inefficient GPUs even in their high end chips. Their power efficiency efforts are also way behind Qualcomm. They're also serial GPL violators.I'd rather use a clay tablet with a wooden stick than to ever use a Mediatek device again.
serendip - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
To add salt to the wound, an Anandtech review of the Redmi Note 4 with an X25 showed 20-30% *less* battery life compared to a Note 3 Pro with a Snapdragon 650, with similar performance and using similarly-sized battery packs. HiSilicon has already leapfrogged Mediatek so they're stuck with the low end market.1_rick - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
"Even for games I'd question the need for massive GPU power."Bizarrely, Farmville for mobile requires something like an 800-series GPU or it will intermittently lag badly.
jabber - Sunday, March 4, 2018 - link
Yeah I don't care about GPU performance either. If having a lower power GPU gives me another 6 hours battery I'll take it. Gaming on a phone isn't for me.LauRoman - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
There was a split in 600 performance.Imagine nvidia 1070 performance (forget any Ti version). If you were forced to, would you lump it with a 1080 or a 1060? Or if already lumped in with a 1060, wouldn't it make sense to split it (if price and performance was already different)?
levizx - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
How is finally making sense garbage? P60 is pure garbage. Cat 7 LTE in 2018? SD450 Could do better.ZolaIII - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Earlier this year there whose a rumor of S670 to get a A6xx GPU that's 3/4 sized of a current flagship with 4 A75's and 4 A55's... Now newer leaks suggest S670 will be A6xx GPU half sized from flag one on S845 & 2x A75's 6x A55's. My guess is that QC made renaming & the earlier belief leak supposed to be S670 will indeed be the first representative of the S7xx series.Valantar - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Quite possible. There's no reason the rebranding should come with a price hike, so if this means we'll see the line of chips previously known as the Snapdragon >650 line in some actual shipping hardware from serious brands, I'm all for it. 80-90% of flagship performance in somewhat above-midrange phones? Yes please.serendip - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
The last time 65x chips were used widely was Xiaomi used the 650/652 in the Redmi Note 3 and Mi Max. $150-200 for 80% of flagship performance was insane. It's telling that the successors to both models used a cheaper, slower 625.It could be that the 65x devices got too close to flagship performance at half the price. The 660 and 670 chips look likely to repeat the same scenario, providing almost flagship performance for midrange or even budget prices. Maybe Qualcomm want to move these towards 700 branding so they and OEMs can charge higher prices.
teldar - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Yes. I also think this is likely. As an aside I've been looking to get a new phone soon. I've got a Oneplus One. It's over 4 years old now. I'd been thinking about the Moto G6 Plus because there were rumors it was going to use the SD660. Now I'm thinking it's either going to be a new Nokia 6 Plus or the Oneplus 5T. The nokia uses the 660 and the 5T uses the 835. I'd be happy with either.serendip - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
The Mi Max 3 is supposed to use a 660 with a bigger 18:9 7" display and a monster 5500 mAh battery pack. I don't think anyone else has those specs on a budget model.The 660 is basically a 14nm version of the 652 so it should be screaming fast and still efficient. A 670 with A55 and A75 cores would be nice but that's only just been announced, so shipping devices could be a year away.
ZolaIII - Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - link
Last time Xiaomi had competition, now QC has multiple competition coming from both MTK & Samsung. While new MTK P offering seams charming real threat is last years big miss the X30 that MTK is now selling with a big discount.This year will be much more interesting regarding SoC's.
serendip - Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - link
Mediatek need to be more open with GPL licensing and they need more efficient designs. The X20 in the Redmi Note 4 has 4x+4x A53 and 2x A72; the 650 in the Redmi Note 3 Pro has 4x A53 and 2x A72, yet the older phone is both more efficient and has higher performance.A decacore chip is a bit of a joke... I know because I was a longtime user of the original Redmi Note with the MT6592's 8x A7 and that was maddeningly slow compared to a Snapdragon 410 with 4x A7.
Wardrive86 - Thursday, March 1, 2018 - link
SD410 had 4 x A53ZolaIII - Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - link
To put it simple; their will be a price hike compared to the current 14nm S6xx offering as it will be both 10 nm and with 33% bigger GPU which account for about 20~25% of whole SoC. S650/652/653 ware cheap thanks to old planar 28 nm lithography. It's possible to do it again with FD-SOI but none of the vendor's is even trying to do it. 22nm FD-SOI is able to out match the 10nm FinFET regarding power consumption if it's used with back biosing and as the both front and back end for both digital, RF and mixed block's wile retaining frequencies used in the midrange SoC's.serendip - Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - link
The 65x series was a crazy idea, using an old process with new architecture to get a speedy chip at lower cost. If an old 28nm chip is almost as good as a 14nm flagship...I think it all comes down to sales and marketing. Intel and Qualcomm behave similarly, they put financial considerations above technical ones. Qualcomm would make less money making a load of 66x or 67x chips on 22nm compared to pushing 84x on 10nm.
Dragonstongue - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
no matter what likely it will be using too many cpu cores etc, strapped into a stupid easy to break mostly glass type "smartphone" that chews through its battery life more then it should.New and modern is a good thing, but not when it comes at the cost of durability day to day functionality and the privilege of paying more than one should for something that is engineered to fail in many ways.
"paper thin, half the weight 8 cores, a battery that lasts half as long as it should because we do not bother to test the OS, we removed the headphone jack because of some BS reasoning, we cram as many pixels as possible into the screen even when we did not need to do this, say hello to the new for 20xx model Y phone..get it today while you still have money in your wallet"
hybrid2d4x4 - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
I would love it if they'd have a series of SoCs that pair a pair of wide/fast cores with a pair of efficient cores to bring good quads to the mid-range devices, and leave the octa- and beyond versions for flagships. It pisses me off to see 8 slow A53 cores in the mid-range devices as if that's actually better in any usage scenario outside of MT benchmarks than a quad A53 or even dual A7x series.Valantar - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
So... You want the Snapdragon 820/821? Kidding aside, outside of Samsung's new M3 cores, there are no ARM cores outside of Apple wide enough to make a layout like this a good choice at the moment, as you'd end up needing all cores active pretty much all the time. I agree that the concept is far superior, though. No use in stuffing eight crappy cores in there when ST performance is your biggest weakness.hybrid2d4x4 - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Yes, in essence I want the SD 820/821 formula to be applied to the mid-range with current cores/mfg process. Aside from that 650 that appeared in almost no devices and was on an old 28nm process, it's either: you get a flagship or get a POS SoC, with no real mid-range.serendip - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
The weird thing is that in most daily usage, a 8x A53 chip like the 625 performs similarly to a 4x A53 like the 650. The 625 also gains an edge in efficiency due to the smaller process node. Android now gobbles up as many cores as it can, it's only intermittent tasks like web page rendering and app loading that benefit from big A72 cores.That being said, it's great to have those big cores when needed. My Mi Max with a 650 shows almost no jank and web page rendering is restricted more by network speeds.
ZolaIII - Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - link
Put it to unofficial LineageOS by nijel8 and me & use my performance script & you will feel even more performance benefits in Chrome and similar heavy tasks while having a much better efficiency in general medium to lite use. ;)zodiacfml - Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - link
Whatever. Pretty futile except for its OEMs. Performance of phones with the SD625 and up are pretty good. I wouldn't mind using an SD 625 phone.serendip - Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - link
I have to reluctantly agree with you there. The 625 really is good enough for most people and most tasks that fast cores like the A72 are a luxury, not a need. The mobile market is ruled by a good-enough mentality so it's likely that OEMs and consumers will gravitate towards cheaper 62x and 63x chips, leaving the 66x or 7xx high and dry. Again.bhagyesh11698 - Saturday, March 3, 2018 - link
SnapDragon 700 Series will be best Series ever for mobile phones. www.ggamestorrents.combhagyesh11698 - Saturday, March 3, 2018 - link
http://www.ggamestorrents.com/