Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips won’t power your next phone but might end up in your IoT thingies

Historically, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon brand has been used for Mobile processors, and that began to change with the Snapdragon Wear chips being specifically introduced for the wearable market. Now the Snapdragon range has two new processors intended for the IoT. The Snapdragon 600E and 410E (E for embedded we’re assuming) brings the full range of connectivity, graphics and processing ability of the Snapdragon range to the Iot space.

Two significant factors of these new chips are firstly, they will be backed by a 10 year extended life support period (which currently expires in 9 years ?), this means manufacturers who use these chips in their devices will continue to receive support for things like security patches and documentation from Qualcomm until at least 2025.

For the typically longer lasting IoT devices this is a big deal. OEMs who use these chips can have some confidence that they will be able to continue to support and update their products well into the future. The second change is Qualcomm has announced that they have partnered with Arrow Electronics to make an off the shelf development board allowing for easier prototyping and easy access to smaller chip purchasers.

As you would expect the 410E is a mid-range chip with 4 x 1.4 GHz Cortex cores and an Adreno 306 GPU. The 600E is a higher-end processor with 4 x 71.7 GHz Krait cores and an Adreno 320 GPU. They both have a standard assortment of connectivity options with the 600E offering a wider assortment.

With the IoT constantly on the verge of becoming something useful it’s not surprising that Qualcomm want’s to get into that market before the proverbial horse has bolted.