Qualcomm Launches Snapdragon 429, 439, And 632 SoC Trio For Mainstream Phones

Starting from the bottom and working our way up, the Snapdragon 429 is a quad-core SoC featuring Cortex A53 performance cores each operating at 1.95GHz. Qualcomm is quoting up to a 25 percent performance improvement over the Snapdragon 425. The Snapdragon 439 is an octa-core part with four Cortex A53 performance cores and four efficiency cores clocked at 1.95GHz and 1.45GHz respectively offering up to a 25 percent boost compared to the Snapdragon 430. Both SoCs are based on a 12nm manufacturing process.

 

Finally, we have the Snapdragon 632, which is another octa-core design with quad performance/efficiency cores all clocked at 1.8GHz (with up to 40 percent boost compared to the Snapdragon 626). Interestingly enough, unlike the lesser two chips, this SoC is based on a 14nm manufacturing process.

The Snapdragon 429 and 439 both feature an onboard Snapdragon X6 LTE modem, with the former sporting an Adreno 504 GPU (HD+ support) and the latter bumping that to an Adreno 505 (FHD+). The Snapdragon 429 can accommodate a single 16MP camera sensor on the rear or up to dual 8MP sensors, while the Snapdragon 439 bumps the single camera sensor limit to 21MP.

The Snapdragon 632 steals the show, however, with a Snapdragon X9 LTE modem, Adreno 506 GPU (FHD+), and support for a single 24MP camera sensor or up to dual 13MP sensors.

Qualcomm is promising on-device processing with "enhanced AI features", but there's no mention of the dedicated hardware AI engine like what’s incorporated on the Snapdragon 710and 845. With that being said, Qualcomm says that the new members of the Snapdragon family support the Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK, Android Neural Networks SDK along with Caffe/Caffe2, TensorFlow/TensorFlow Lite and ONNX frameworks. 

“The introduction of Snapdragon 632, 439 and 429 builds off Qualcomm Technologies’ highest- selling mobile platforms and provides users with increased performance and power efficiency, superior graphics, AI capabilities and enhanced connectivity features,” said Kedar Kondap, VP of product management for Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We’re excited to offer these new platforms with enhanced features to our OEMs and consumers.”

Qualcomm expects that the first products to be based on Snapdragon 429, 439 and 632 will debut during the latter half of 2018.