Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 and 430 processors - performance meets affordability

Qualcomm has weird schedules, and it seems this Monday night was the chosen period of time to announce a bunch of their new goodies. The processor maker just told us about their new Quick Charge 3.0 technology, and now we are all over a couple new processors that were just announced. These would be the Snapdragon 617 and 430.

As you might expect, both are made for mid-end devices. The Snapdragon 430 is for super affordable products, while the Snapdragon 617 starts to get closer to the high end spectrum (but isn’t quite there yet). These new chipsets are unique in their own ways, though, so let’s touch on a bit of information for each.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 617

According to Qualcomm, this will be the first to be released out of the two. We can expect to see smartphones touting this chipset “by the end of 2015”. We are not getting the full set of details just yet, but we do know the processor will support X8 LTE with Cat 7. This means it will support speeds of up to 200 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up.

Its dual-ISPs will allow for taking photos at up to 21 MP. In addition, performance will be enhanced by the Adreno 405 GPU and Hexagon 546 DSP. Not to mentions those 8 cores, which can be clocked up to 1.5 GHz.

Qualcomm Snapdragn 430

It will take a little longer for us to take a look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 in retail devices. The manufacturer expects its partners to bring this chip to market “later in 2016”, and they claim it’s totally worth the wait.

The Snapdragon 430 supports X6 LTE with Cat 4 speeds, which are a little slower than those in the Snapdragon 617. But the company does grant this CPU dual-ISPs, an Adreno 505 GPU and the Hexagon 536 DSP. By the way, the Snapdragon 430 will be the first of its series to get the Adreno 505 treatment, so this is a bit special.

Wrapping up

Ready to give these a test? It’s still a while before we see these processors coming around, but we will be ready to put them through the paces here at Android Authority. By the way, Qualcomm doesn’t fail to remind us that both of these support the new Quick Charge 3.0 standard. You are looking at amazing charging speeds if your next phone manages to come with one of these chipsets!