Qualcomm, one of the world's most renowned mobile chipset manufacturers, has just announced three new chipsets in its Snapdragon 600 and 400 tiers: the 653, 626, and 427. Sure, these aren't as exciting as a flagship 830 would be, but the mid-range market is huge for Qualcomm. The San Diego-based company has actually made some fairly interesting improvements with these new pieces of silicon.

The 653, 626, and 427 all receive a new X9 LTE modem and support for Quick Charge 3.0 and dual cameras. This X9 LTE supports Cat 7 downlink speeds of up to 300MBps, and Cat 13 uplink speeds of up to 150Mbps (up to 50% better than the X8 LTE's uplink speeds). It also supports LTE Advanced Carrier Aggregation with up to 2x20MHz in both downlink and uplink, 64-QAM in uplink, and better call clarity and reliability on VoLTE calls with the company's Enhanced Voice Services technology.

The Snapdragon 653 (MSM8976Pro), if you couldn't tell from the number, is the most powerful chipset of these three. Qualcomm says that the 653 is intended to perform 10% better than the 652 it replaces, and achieves this with a maximum clock speed of 1.95GHz (the 652 could go up to 1.8GHz), support for up to 8GB of RAM (wow), better GPU performance, and other improvements in its architecture. It also adds Enhanced Voice Services, which apparently makes VoLTE calls sound even better.

The 626 (MSM8953Pro) is also intended to be 10% better than its predecessor (the 625). It can be clocked up to 2.2GHz, up from the 625's maximum of 2.0GHz. This chipset also adds Qualcomm's TruSignal antenna boost, which helps improve signal reception in congested areas.

Lastly, the 427 (MSM8920) gets the fewest visible improvements. It does get better CPU and GPU performance than the previous 425, although the details of this aren't elaborated on. Clock speeds remain the same when compared with the 425 (1.4GHz), although the X9 LTE modem is a huge jump over the 425's X6 LTE model. The 427 also gets the aforementioned TruSignal tech.

Qualcomm expects the 653 and 626 to be commercially available by the end of 2016, and the 427 by early 2017. The company also announced several other new things today, which we'll have coverage on shortly.

PRESS RELEASE

Source: Qualcomm