The budget smartphone segment is soaring with options, and the majority of them have a MediaTek chip under the hood, while some have a Unisoc processor. Qualcomm is seen missing from this segment but that could change soon, as a Qualcomm official has confirmed that it is on track to bring 5G smartphone prices below $100, which approximately converts to Rs 8,000.
In an interview with The Mobile Indian, Saurabh Arora, who is heading Mobile, Compute and XR Business Development at Qualcomm India, confirmed that the chipmaker is working with its partners to bring down 5G smartphone prices to a sub $100 price point, which is approximately Rs 8,000 when converted to INR. “We are on track with our goal to bring 5G to the masses at an affordable price tag”, said Arora.
When asked about the timeline of such an announcement, Saurabh denied comment. As per Arora, it depends on the OEMs when they plan to introduce the devices in question. Aside from that, the Qualcomm official also talked about the introduction of Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 in India, and the first phone to bring it would be the Poco F6 5G.
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is a 4nm chip based on the TSMC process. It consists of an 8-core CPU structure that includes a Cortex-X4 prime core running at 3.0GHz clock speed, four performance cores at 2.8GHz, and three efficiency cores at 2.0GHz. It supports up to 24GB of LPDDR5x RAM (up to 4,200MHz) and UFS 4.0 storage. The Adreno 735 GPU handles the graphics.
However, it is still less powerful than the 8 Gen 3. The less powerful components include the prime core running at a lower clock speed of 3.0Ghz, compared to up to 3.4Ghz on the 8 Gen 3. The core setup is also different in 8s Gen 3, with 4 big cores and 3 small ones for an 1+4+3 configuration. The original 8 Gen 3 chip gets a 1+5+2 configuration, all of which have a higher clock speed than 8s Gen 3’s cores.