What is Qualcomm Snapdragon and Use in Phones

Qualcomm Snapdragon

Qualcomm spokesperson states Snapdragon as SNAP indicates FAST and DRAGON indicates FIERCE.

Snapdragon is a suite of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products designed and marketed by Qualcomm for mobile devices.

The Snapdragon central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM RISC instructions set, and a single SoC may include multiple CPU cores, a graphic processing unit (GPU) a wireless modem, and other software and hardware to support a smartphone’s global positioning system (GPS), camera, gesture recognition and video.

Snapdragon semiconductor are embedded in devices of various systems, including Andriod and Windows Phone devices. They are also used for netbooks, in cars, wearable devices and other devices.

History

The first Snapdragon product to be made available to customer device manufacturers was the QSD8250, which was released in November 2007. It included the first 1 Ghz processor for mobile phones.

Qualcomm introduced its “Krait” microarchitecture in the second generation of Snapdragon SoC in 2011, allowing each processor core to adjust its speed based on the device’s needs.

At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, Qualcomm introduced the first of the Snapdragon 800 series and renamed prior models as the 200,400 and 600 series.

Several new iterations have been introduced since, such as the Snapdragon 805, 810, 615, and 410. Qualcomm re-branded its modem products under the snapdragon name in December 2014.

The current Snapdragon naming scheme was implemented after the Snapdragon 800 family was announced at the 2013 Consumer Electronic Show; prior models were renamed to the 200,400 or 600 series. The 400 family is entry-level, the 600 is mass-market or mid-range, and 800 family is for high-end or flagship phones.

Benchmark tests

• Benchmark tests of the Snapdragon 800's processor by PC Magazine found that its processing power was comparable to similar products from Nvidia.
• Benchmarks of the Snapdragon 805 found that the Adreno 420 GPU resulted in a 40 percent improvement in graphics processing over the Adreno 330 in the Snapdragon 800, though there were only slight differences in processor benchmarks.
• Benchmarks of the Snapdragon 801 inside an HTC One found a "bump all around" in benchmark improvements over the 800.
• In 2015, Samsung's decision not to use the Snapdragon 810 in its Galaxy S6 had a significant detrimental impact on Snapdragon's revenues and reputation.
• Benchmark tests by Ars Technica confirmed rumors that the 810 under-performed lower-end models and had overheating issues.
• A Qualcomm spokesperson said these tests were done with early versions of the 810 that weren’t ready for commercial use. An updated version was released and was found to moderately improve thermal throttling, GPU clock speeds, memory latency, and memory bandwidth when tested in a commercial product, the Xiaomi Mi Note Pro.