The year 2020 seems to be one of commercialisation of 5G as carriers in many countries have started to deploy it. Last year, 5G was limited to flagship smartphones. However, the game has changed this year as Qualcomm and MediaTek are rolling out budget 5G SoCs. And things are expected to get even more interesting as latest leaks have pointed out that Qualcomm is working on a 600 series of processors with support for 5G.
Well-known source of tips on Weibo, Digitial Chat Station has said that the model number of the Qualcomm’s new SoC will be ‘sm6350’. If he is to be believed, the SoC could have the usual eight-core arrangement with two high-performance cores clocked at 2.24GHz and six other power-efficient cores clocked at a lower frequency of 1.80GHz.
An Adreno 615 GPU clocked at 850MHz is said to handle graphic duties. This seems to be a slight departure from the Adreno 612 GPU found on its sibling the Snapdragon 675. However, we will have to wait for the details on its performance improvement.
Additionally, the source has expressed scepticism on the architecture that is being used here but has said that the SoC could be based on Cortex A77. Even if this isn’t the case, there’s always the tried and tested Cortex A76 found on slightly higher mid-rangers like the Snapdragon 765 and 765G, but we are not sure about it yet.
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Apart from this, the source has also stated that Qualcomm’s counterpart, MediaTek, is coming up with an entry-level MT6853 chip and Huawei’s Kirin low-end 5G SoC also seems to be in development. There is no word about the launch of these SoCs yet but we can expect their arrival in the latter half of this year.
This development certainly bodes well for 5G adoption among masses. Once affordable 5G handsets will be available, governments across the world will have a reason to push for faster development of the network.
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