Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 215 For Low-End Market

On July 9, Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 215 mobile platform, a full-featured SoC chip for smartphones from $60 to $130. With this move, Qualcomm wants to push MediaTek out from the low-end smartphone niche. It’s not a secret MediaTek has no equals in this market, while Qualcomm leads in the mid-range and flagship niches. So if everything goes according to Qualcomm’s plan, MediaTek should bring anything worthy to the market in order to make a competition to this chip.

Anyways, let’s see what key parameters the Qualcomm Snapdragon 215 comes with. It uses a 64-bit architecture and a 28nm process node. The CPU has four Cortեx A53 cores, clocked at 1.3GHz. The manufacturer claims they are 50% faster than the previous generation (Snapdragon 210). The GPU was upgraded to the Adreno 308 with a 28% performance increase.

The Snapdragon 215 also uses an X5 LTE full Netcom baseband. It supports dual-card dual VoLTE, downlink Cat.4 (150Mbps), peripheral support USB 2.0, Bluetooth 4.2, 802.11ac, LPDDR3 memory, eMMC 4.5 flash memory, QC1.0 fast charge, NFC payment, etc.

In terms of selling points, the Snapdragon 215 added support for 19.9:9 ratio full screen and 1560 x 720 resolution screen. The addition of dual ISP also improved camera performance, up to 13MP and 1080P video.

In addition, Qualcomm said that thanks to the synergy of DSP, battery life can reach 5 days of music playback, 20+ hours of voice calls and 10+ hours of video playback.

The manufacturer claims commercial equipment with the Snapdragon 215 will be available in the second half of the year.