Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 480 Announces New Wave of Budget 5G Phones

Qualcomm has officially announced the Snapdragon 480 5G, the company’s latest 5G-compatible processor and the first in its Snapdragon 4 chip series, which power Android devices which tend to be much cheaper than most of Qualcomm’s 5G efforts at this day.

News of a Series 4 chip with 5G was originally announced at IFA 2020, but today’s announcement marks the first real details of the new processor. The Snapdragon 480 has a built-in Snapdragon X51 modem that supports mmWave and sub-6 GHz networks.

The addition of 5G to the 4 Series could be one of the main factors to date in making the next generation network standard more accessible to users around the world. Right now, most 5G phones tend to cost over $ 500 – the technology is generally limited to mid-tier and flagship phones. But by adding it to the Snapdragon 4-series lineup, Qualcomm makes it easy for manufacturers to add 5G to their cheapest phones in the world. Range of $ 125 to $ 250. This means that 2021 could be the year when budget 5G phones arrive.

But the Snapdragon 480 isn’t just interesting because of its 5G support – it also promises to deliver a huge jump in performance over its predecessor, the Snapdragon 460. Specifically, Qualcomm claims that the Snapdragon 480 is expected to deliver twice the performance of the old model for CPU and GPU, with a 70% improvement for AI tasks. (Specifically, via the new Adreno 619 GPU, Kryo 460 processor, and Qualcomm Hexagon 686 chipsets.)

There are also several features that have flowed from the old premium Snapdragon products, debuting on the budget line for the first time. The Snapdragon 480 is the first 4-series chip to use an 8nm process, the first to support Quick Charge 4 Plus, the first to support FHD + 120fps panels, the first to offer stills of 64 megapixels and the first to offer a triple ISP for the integration of three cameras that can take up to three photos at a time. Again, none of these features are new, but they should significantly expand what budget phones will be able to do – especially when combined with the performance improvements to the processor and GPU.

The first phones with the Snapdragon 480 are expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2021. HMD’s Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi, Motorola and Nokia are among the big companies expected to release phones with the new chip in the coming months.