In the last couple of years, mobile SoCs have come a long way. From meagre low clocked single core designs, we now have dual core even quad core chips making their way into budget designs. In an effort to boost the usability of low-cost smartphones, Qualcomm is bringing their LTE technology into ever cheaper SoCs with the latest 205 Mobile Platform SoC.
Previous to the 205, the lowest entry-level Qualcomm SoC with LTE was the 210. The 210 featured 4 x ARM Cortex A7 cores at 1.1 GHz which kept the cost from being too low. When usable budget phones are at $50, even a dollar decrease can change the profit margin significantly. To cut costs, the 205 features just 2 x ARM Cortex A7 cores at 1.1 GHz. Made on the 28nm process with the same radio and GPU but reduced video encode and decode support.
Fundamentally, the 205 is just a more limited version of its bigger siblings. It’s interesting that Qualcomm chose to base the design on a SoC released in 2014 but I suppose this is meant to keep both production and R&D costs down. For developing markets where the mobile phone is both the main computing device and access point for the internet, its great to see the higher speeds of LTE being offered.
