Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 480 announces a new wave of affordable 5G phones

Qualcomm officially announced the Snapdragon 480 5G, the company’s latest 5G capable processor and the first in its Snapdragon 4 series of chips that power Android devices that tend to be much cheaper than most Qualcomm 5G efforts to date .

News of a 5G series 4 chip was originally presented at IFA 2020, but today’s announcement marks the first real details for the new processor. The Snapdragon 480 has an integrated Snapdragon X51 modem with support for mmWave and sub-6GHz networks.

The addition of 5G to the 4 series may be one of the biggest factors in making the next generation network standard more accessible to users worldwide. At the moment, most 5G phones tend to cost more than $ 500 – the technology is generally limited to mid-range phones and flagships. But by adding it to the Snapdragon 4-series line, Qualcomm is enabling manufacturers to easily add 5G to their cheapest phones in the $ 125 to $ 250 range. This means that 2021 may be the year that the truly economical 5G phones will arrive.

But the Snapdragon 480 is not only interesting because of its 5G support – it also promises to offer a huge leap in performance compared to its predecessor, the Snapdragon 460. Specifically, Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 480 should offer twice the performance of the old model for CPU and GPU, with a 70 percent improvement for AI tasks. (Specifically, via the new Adreno 619 GPU, Kryo 460 CPU and Qualcomm Hexagon 686 chipsets.)

There are also a number of features that have emerged from previous Snapdragon premium products, making their debut in the budget line for the first time. The Snapdragon 480 is the first series 4 chip to use an 8nm process, the first to support Quick Charge 4 Plus, the first to support 120fps FHD + panels, the first to offer 64 megapixel still images and the first to offer a triple ISP panel for integration of three cameras that can take up to three photos at the same time. Again, none of these are new features, but they should broadly expand what low-cost phones will be able to do – especially when combined with the performance improvements that come to the CPU and GPU.

The first phones with the Snapdragon 480 are expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2021. Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi, Motorola and Nokia from HMD are among the top companies expected to launch phones equipped with the new chip in the coming months.