By Mike Freeman, The San Diego Union-Tribune
After losing Samsung as a customer last year, Qualcomm has a lot riding on its next generation of smartphone processor – the Snapdragon 820.
Now the San Diego wireless giant is beginning to offer details of the Snapdragon 820’s power. On Monday, the company touted high-speed cellular radios, better Wi-Fi/LTE capabilities and rapid recharging as technologies that it hopes will propel Snapdragon 820 back to the top.
Qualcomm said the new Snapdragon 820 system on a chip will have 600 megabits per second wireless download speeds and 150 megabits per second uploads with the latest improvements to the 4G LTE modem.
Of course, average consumers will never see speeds that fast. Six hundred megabits is the theoretical maximum capability under perfect conditions on the network, including no other users eating up bandwidth. Still, it is an upgrade from the 450 megabit capabilities of this year’s Snapdragon 810.
“With technologies like 4K video, virtual reality and cognitive computing rapidly evolving, it’s important to provide consumers with the speed and bandwidth to create a more compelling mobile experience,” said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president of product management for Qualcomm.
In addition, Qualcomm will add LTE-U capabilities to the Snapdragon 820, which is expected to show up in smartphones in the first half of next year.
This feature hands off cellular traffic to unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum if it can do so without bogging down Wi-Fi speeds. Smartphone users never know the handoff is occurring.
LTE-U is controversial among some Wi-Fi providers, but a few cellular network operators are pushing ahead with the technology as a way to add capacity to their networks.
Fast battery charging technology also will be included in the Snapdragon 820. The company says its Quick Charge 3.0 system can charge a smartphone from zero to 80 percent in about 35 minutes.
Typical mobile devices require almost an hour and a half to go from zero to 80 percent, according to Qualcomm.
While more than 60 top-tier Android smartphones worldwide are powered by the Snapdragon 810 this year, Qualcomm suffered a major blow when Samsung dropped the chip from its flagship Galaxy S6 line of smartphones.
Samsung instead went with its own, in-house application processor and LTE modem in most Galaxy S6 models.
The loss of Samsung contributed to Qualcomm’s revenue shrinking this year. Full-year sales are forecast at about $25 billion – or $1.5 billion below last year’s levels.
According to analysts, one reason behind Samsung’s move was the Snapdragon 810 had an off-the-shelf app processor design.
In previous models of Snapdragon, Qualcomm custom designed its app processor cores to add hot rod features. It aims to return to a hot rod core design with the Snapdragon 820.
Jim McGregor, principal analyst with Tirias Research, said perhaps the largest advance of the Snapdragon 820 is it brings a large suite of different technologies -- apps processor, graphics processor, display, cellular radio and so on -- together in a unified system on a chip.
"Qualcomm has been talking a lot about different parts of the 820," said McGregor. "Quite honestly, the most vital part of the 820 is the whole thing. It is is probably the most heterogeneous processing system-on-a-chip that I have ever seen."
©2015 The San Diego Union-Tribune Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
