You would’ve never though that the smartphone central processing units market would get so saturated and competitive in such a short period of time. Yet that’s exactly what has happened. In an effort to remain relevant, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon is becoming enraged.
Things are unraveling now on the smartphone CPU market with a striking similarity to how they went on back in the day, when the market for computer processors became a battlefield between Intel, AMD and other tech manufacturers. Intel has since kind of won that battle. And then there was the GPU battle, where graphic processing units were put head to head in a fight to the death between ATI (now long bought by AMD) and NVidia.
Now there is a new battle: smartphone CPUs. Not that long ago, when I personally had my first ever smarphone, people weren’t paying that much attention to the power that these devices’ hearts had. And I never could understand why, with me being atoned to the fact that CPUs are the most important parts in any device. In fact, people did not care much about anything in smartphones except cameras, apps, and sometimes data space.
Now, things have changed. All phones readily boast their most detailed of specs, in a clear indication that the mentality of customers has shifted from how well it takes photos to how smooth does it actually run. And Qualcomm has been the first major contender in the CPU market.
But recently, things started looking grim for the American company. Samsung, once the main endorser of Qualcomm, has abandoned the processors on its latest devices, favoring some made by themselves. While many major producers still use Qualcomm, Samsung’s move was a big hit, costing them millions of dollars’ worth of processors, and 15% of their workforce their jobs.
That was bad. And possibly a very mischievous move from the Koreans.
But Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 820 promises to be the best Samsung could ever want. Tim Leland, vice president of the visual processing group of Qualcomm, says that not only will the new processor make your phone faster, it will also make it cooler. Literally. It will reduce the need for energy that apps currently have and thus the battery will last longer, and the phone itself will never get so hot. The last thing you want on a summer day is a phone you could fry an egg on.
Besides, Leland promises the display will look sharper than ever, and that cameras will be able to make much better use of the phone’s processor.
To this extent, however, Samsung has not made any statements. It remains to be seen whether Samsung will make amends with Qualcomm, but things are pointing in the right direction.
Image source: extremetech.com