What type of processor is snapdragon

Everything you need to know about smartphone chipsets. These chip families spanned from the late s to and varied wildly in terms of capabilities. The early Snapdragon S family chipsets were notable at the time thanks to their 1GHz clock speeds — albeit with single-core CPU designs. The series then followed the general industry trend of going from single-core to dual-core CPUs.

Could you imagine a modern smartphone processor lacking dedicated graphics hardware in ? Otherwise, we also got Bluetooth 2 to 4. While there was some overlap, Qualcomm began to move away from the S series in early following the launch of the 28nm Snapdragon chipset. This was adopted as the high-end chipset of choice by most Android OEMs at the time. It offered a powerful quad-core CPU design — featuring Krait cores — while also supporting p screens.

The Snapdragon also came at a time when multi-core processors were gaining traction fast with the likes of Samsung and MediaTek going so far as to offer octa-core designs.

However, Qualcomm showed that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to CPU cores. Qualcomm followed up the Snapdragon with the first Snapdragon processors in its history. We got the Snapdragon chipset in early and the Snapdragon in early The 28nm Snapdragon and made for a big jump over the Snapdragon , while the series naming convention was used for the mid-range segment from here on out.

Qualcomm would follow up with the Snapdragon in late , landing in the Motorola Nexus 6, and Samsung Galaxy Note 4 range. It would prove to be the last major bit flagship processor from the company, and what a swansong it was on paper. Did you know: The Snapdragon and chipsets actually got announced at the same time with the Snapdragon appearing in devices in the first half of the year.

Meanwhile, the chipset landed in devices in the second half of Apple caught the Android world napping when it launched the iPhone 5s in late featuring the first bit smartphone chipset. The Snapdragon was the more powerful chipset on paper, delivering an octa-core design for the first time in its flagship tier 4x Cortex-A57 and 4x Cortex-A53 and Adreno graphics.

As for the Snapdragon , it had a lot in common with its stablemates too, but lacked 4K display support and 55MP output. There were reports that phones released early in the year all suffered from thermal-related issues at first. The firm released a Snapdragon V2. The Snapdragon saw the firm revert to fully custom CPUs and a quad-core design, using the Kryo name for the first time.

The new flagship silicon also served up the Vulkan graphics API, which delivers improved performance in games and apps that support it. Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon in the second half of , delivering slightly better CPU and GPU performance as well as slightly better power consumption.

Other than that, the two chipsets were identical. Tasks that can be offloaded to the DSP include computer vision, fitness tracking, and some image processing. It would only rise in importance in the following years. Did you know: The Snapdragon and remain the last flagship Snapdragon phone processors to use fully custom CPU cores.

Samsung would launch its first custom CPU in — seen in the Exynos — but it killed off the division responsible for this project in late The Snapdragon in was a notable release for the company as it established a couple of traditions that the firm still maintains to this day. The Exynos processor is made by Samsung in-house for use with its own Samsung smartphones, with some exceptions. Snapdragon SoCs are made by the company Qualcomm for use in third-party mobile devices.

The majority of smartphone makers use Snapdragon as the primary SoCs in their devices. This distinction is because of a deal Samsung and Qualcomm have that compels Samsung to use Snapdragon in these locations. Coming to the main differences, Exynos chips are usually Octa-core whereas Snapdragon chips are Quad-Core chips. While Exynos processors have more chips, Snapdragon chips can be overclocked and achieve much higher processing speeds than the Exynos ones.

So, overall the processing power is balanced out between the two processors. GPUs are helpful in processing graphics so, in terms of gaming, Snapdragon is the clear winner. When it comes to RAM speeds, the Exynos is much faster because it has a smaller semiconductor that can handle a lot of memory at faster speeds.

These tweaks include slightly better external display support and the ability to address more RAM. Either way, phones with the Snapdragon are still powerful enough for smooth performance in advanced games and in general.

But you do miss out on newer features like 5G, 8K recording and super-fast imaging capabilities, which the aforementioned chipsets all offer. Otherwise, the Snapdragon is a step below the , with the mid-range Poco X3 Pro using it.

Qualcomm also used to offer in-house designed CPU cores until the Snapdragon back in The company recently acquired CPU company Nuvia , and has revealed that it will be using its CPU tech in laptops, flagship phones, and more. So it certainly sounds like custom CPU cores could be back on the menu in the next few years.

The San Diego company has also invested heavily in other bits of silicon for its chipsets, such as the GPUs, modems, and image signal processors for cameras. The Snapdragon range is generally considered the top dog in terms of features, capabilities, and brand name, although other competitors generally have plenty to offer too. This is due to the sheer number of them, as well as the lower end chips crossing into the series.

The Snapdragon series is essentially an upper mid-range family of processors, and the Snapdragon G is the most capable and recent of the lot. Released early in , the G has the same 5nm design as the latest flagship processors, supports both mmWave and sub-6GHz flavors of 5G, as well as a triple-tiered CPU design.

Qualcomm would follow this up with the Snapdragon G , which seems to be slightly inferior to the G but still a great mid-range processor. The company also told us at the time of launch that it was using a different foundry to make these chips, presumably to get around the industry-wide chip shortage. The G actually features newer CPU cores though, which should theoretically give it a slight boost on paper over its stablemates.

But this comes at the expense of graphical performance, machine learning power, and camera capabilities compared to the and G chips. We saw a trend in for some manufacturers to use the Snapdragon G chipset for their flagship chipsets, such as the Google Pixel 5 and LG Velvet.

This demonstrates just how capable these processors are these days. Furthermore, LG is no longer in the smartphone business and Google is using its own in-house processor for the Pixel 6 series. There are still a few 4G-enabled Snapdragon series processors in use by manufacturers, and these are the Snapdragon series , Snapdragon G , and Snapdragon G , which are next on the totem pole in terms of power and capabilities. Nevertheless, these early Snapdragon series chipsets have plenty in common with the latest Snapdragon family processors more on them in a bit.

Furthermore, all of these aforementioned chipsets support MP snapshots, although they top out at a far lower resolution for multi-frame processing e. HDR, night mode. There is a big step down from here to the next Snapdragon series processors though.