Looks like the company realized that naming these chips as Snapdragon 618 and 620 won’t really differentiate them from the other mid-range chips in the lineup. As a result, Qualcomm has officially rebranded both the chips as Snapdragon 650 (formerly called as Snapdragon 618) and Snapdragon 652 (formerly called as Snapdragon 620).

Here’s the official statement from the company regarding this change. “Because of this, Qualcomm Technologies is making minor adjustments within the product lineup to better reflect the positioning and capabilities of these two processors by renaming the Snapdragon 620 and 618 to the Snapdragon 652 and 650, respectively.”

It’s actually a clever decision by the company. Snapdragon 615 chips are found mostly in mid-range devices, and as compared with chips like the MT6752, it’s not very powerful. Also, the 618 and 620 SoCs are not really successors of this chip, instead, the recently announced Snapdragon 616 can be considered as the true successor. So, it’s always better to differentiate them properly in order to avoid any confusion.

Snapdragon 650 comes with six cores, two Cortex A72, and four Cortex A53 cores. The Snapdragon 652 is even more powerful, featuring four Cortex A72 cores and four Cortex A53 cores. So, it’s really not fair to consider them in the same range as the Snapdragon 616 series. Hence, the rebranding.

What do you think about this move? Do you think rebranding them as 650 series chips will help them = in the long run?

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Huawei Mate 7 was probably one of the best flagship from the company till date. The overall metal design, specs as well as a super efficient fingerprint sensor made it better than most other phones in the market. While we are patiently waiting for some official news from the company regarding the next generation version in the series, we have spotted a render which is allegedly of the Mate 8.

If you look at the design, its almost similar to the Mate 7. You get the same metal body as previous generation. However, there are subtle changes in the positioning of the various parts on the device. For example, the dual LED flash lies below the camera sensor, i.e. in between camera and the fingerprint sensor instead of the top left region. Another noticeable change is that the ‘HUAWEI’ logo that was on the front, just below the display is now absent. Instead, you just have one logo at the rear. The placement of the sensors on top of the display have also changed, and interestingly, we can see an additional sensor in that region.

As for the specs, the Huawei Mate 8 is expected to come with a 2K 6-inch display with the company’s own Kirin 950 64-bit chip and 20.7MP rear camera. There will reportedly be two versions of the device. The higher version will sport 4GB RAM and 64GB of storage while the standard version will come with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory. The flagship will support dual card dual standby.

If Huawei Mate 8 does come with Kirin 950, it will be interesting to analyze the performance of the new chip. We have heard a lot of good things about the new Kirin SoC. If you have been following our site, we had reported that the chip will feature four Cortex A53 power efficient cores and four Cortex A72 powerful cores clocked at 2.4GHz back in March. Yesterday, new rumors confirmed our report, along with other specs such as dual channel LPDDR4 RAM, ARM MAli T880 GPU, Dual ISP with support for up to 42MP and dual SIM support with Cat. 10 LTE connectivity.  You can check out the full possible specs of the Kirin 950 along with a comparison of the current Kirin 930 and 940 chipsets from this detailed article. 

Unfortunately, we still don’t know the release date of the Mate 8 flagship. But hopefully, it will be launched sometime before the end of this year.

The post Huawei Mate 8 Render Leaked, Rumored to Feature Kirin 950 Chipset appeared first on Gizmochina.

While there’s no denying the fact that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 isn’t the best SoC from the company till date, to make up for the loss of reputation, the company is in desperate need of unveiling a power yet efficient chipset. We have heard that the Snapdragon 820 will make up with its performance, but it looks like the company is even improving its 600 series chipsets to a great level.

Earlier today, we came across the Snapdragon 620 chipset on a benchmarking website, revealing a few details about its performance. The MSM8952 chipset managed to score pretty good on both the single core as well as multi-core tests.  In fact, its scores were quite close to Snapdragon 810 which comes from an even better (800 series) chipset family.

The Snapdragon 620 is expected to come with Cortex A72 cores, which also explains the superb single core performance scores. The chip managed to get 1513 which is higher than both Exynos 7420 and Snapdragon 810. Even in the multi-core test, it out performs Snapdragon 810. However, it couldn’t beat Samsung’s Exynos 7420 in the multi-core test.

This looks like a prototype model which was running Android 5.1 Lollipop version with 3GB RAM on board. We hope that the Cortex A72 cores don’t heat up as much as the A57, to avoid issues similar to Snapdragon 810.

The post Snapdragon 620 Spotted On Benchmarking Website, Performance Is Quite Good appeared first on Gizmochina.

Mediatek has been stepping up its game this year with its new MT67XX lineup based on the 64-bit architecture. Back when ARM announced its new Cortex-A72 core, it said that Mediatek will be one of the first chipmakers to utilize this new Cortex core. Today, we have some more details about the upcoming Mediatek chipset based on the Cortex-A72 core.

According to a leaked information, the new Mediatek MT679X chip will use the Cortex-A72 core along with the power efficient Cortex-A53. The chip will be built using the big.LITTLE architecture which saves battery life without sacrificing on power.

It is said that the new chip will leave the 28nm manufacturing process in favor of a better and power efficient process like the 20nm process or even the 16nm FinFet. However, the source doesn’t reveal which one of the two will be used by this new Mediatek chip. If Cortex A72 is built on the 16nm process, then it will be 3.5X faster than Cortex A15 on a 28nm process and 1.9x faster than Cortex A57 using 20nm process.

It is also said that Mediatek will partner up with AMD for its mobile GPU. Up till now, the chip maker used ARM’s Mali GPUs inside its processors.

It looks like the new MT679X processor will turn to be quite powerful yet efficient. The chip is expected to debut by the end of the year, i.e. Q4 2015. So, we can expect smartphones to feature this chip by next year.

The post Report: Cortex A72 powered MT679X will debut in Q4 2015 appeared first on Gizmochina.

Just a few hours back, we reported that Qualcomm may be planning to use the newly announced powerful Cortex A72 processor cores in its 600 series processor. Now new reports have come up online which states that the chipmaker’s direct competitor, Mediatek will also unveil a Cortex A72 powered SoC in the market soon.

The report states that this Chinese chipmaker will use this super powerful A72 cores inside its next SoC which will be based on a 16nm process. Yes, it is said that Mediatek Cortex A72 powered processor will be one of the first chip companies to release a processor based on this high end process.

Cortex A72 is the best processor core from ARM till date. Its both powerful and efficient which increases the performance of mobile handsets to the level of desktop performance. The chip is based on a 16-nanometer chipmaking process, and outputs 30 percent more memory performance and an 80 percent speedier graphics (thanks to the new Mali-T880 GPU). Its in fact 3.5 times more powerful than the predecessor, A15 core. With its powerful specs, the chip can support 4K videos at even 120 fps. It can use ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, which improves battery efficiency and will even bring Google now style voice commands feature inbuilt into the chip.

Overall, expect the performance of this chip to be much better than existing generations. We still don’t know what will be the name of the Mediatek processor with this new core, but expect it to be in the high end series (probably MT67XX). Stay tuned for more updates.

The post Mediatek Cortex A72 powered processor coming in 2015? appeared first on Gizmochina.

Just yesterday, ARM announced the most powerful processor core for smartphones and tablets till date, the Cortex A72. This particular Cortex core will be replacing the current cores for the high end market, i.e. the Cortex A57. However, the announcement failed to mention any details about the upcoming processors from Samsung or even Qualcomm.

Luckily, we didn’t have to wait too long to get more details about Qualcomm’s upcoming processors that will use this high end core. According to the latest industry sources, Qualcomm has at least two SoCs that will be using the Cortex A72 core. This two SoCs will be surprising from the 600 series Snapdragon processors. A recent image leaked online showed off the details of these two SoCs along with the architecture used by them.

In the image, the MSM8976 which is probably the Snapdragon 620, comes with an eight core architecture. The image reveals that the SoC will have four Maia cores clocked at 1.8Ghz and four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.2Ghz. Now we know that Maia is the code name for the new Cortex A72 cores, so this particular SoC will have four such powerful cores.

Coming to the MSM8956 which is probably the Snapdragon 618, it comes with two Cortex A72 cores and four Cortex A53 cores. Since, this is an hexa-core processor, it will be slightly slower than the Snapdragon 820 but expect it to be more power efficient.

Given that the upper mid-range processors are coming with this high-end core, it would be interesting to see what Qualcomm packs into its top end SoCs like the upcoming Snapdragon 815 or the 820. Logically, they should be much more powerful than the 600 series processors.

Anyways, Qualcomm is yet to confirm this news, so make sure you take this leak with a pinch of salt.

Stay tuned for more updates.

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