From PC World: Qualcomm announced a pair of Snapdragon processors for midrange phones Monday night with what might be a tinge of embarrassment. Both include eight cores, a strategy derided by a senior Qualcomm exec two years ago as a dumb idea.
There’s nothing inherently wrong about the Snapdragon 617 and Snapdragon 430—two chips that, as their product designations imply, will be marketed as phones that are cheaper than the flagships housing the Snapdragon 820. Qualcomm also said Monday that the communications processor within the 820 will be known as the X12, supporting “4G+” connectivity with bandwidth up to 650Mbps down and 150Mbps up.
It’s just that in 2013, Qualcomm senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher called eight-core smartphone processors “dumb." Asked whether Qualcomm would follow Mediatek into the market with an 8-core chip, he replied, “We don’t do dumb things.”
Well Chandrasekher, that was then, this is now: Both the Snapdragon 617 and Snapdragon 430 both have octacore processors inside, company executives said.
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