Today, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Mobile Platform. The company is looking to move away from calling their Snapdragon products “processors”, even though that is technically what they are, Qualcomm thinks that because these processors do a whole lot more than that, they should be a platform. Which is where the Qualcomm Snapdragon Mobile Platform comes into play.
In a press release today, Qualcomm explains that the Snapdragon Mobile Platform will be housing all of their offerings, instead of just the one chip. This includes the integrated modem, CPU, GPU DSP and a whole lot more. Many customers don’t know that there is a whole lot more to the internals of their smartphone (or even smartwatch and tablet) than just the processor. Qualcomm makes a good number of parts that are inside every smartphone, and putting it all under the Snapdragon Mobile Platform umbrella. This is all part of a bigger change that Qualcomm will be rolling out over the next few months, rebranding their products, to make it simpler for customers to know what is what.
Qualcomm also announced that only their premium mobile platforms will be under the Snapdragon brand. Their processors that are in the Snapdragon 200 tier will be part of their Qualcomm Mobile brand. The reasoning for this is to make it easier to differentiate their low-end processors from their flagship and high-end solutions. The Qualcomm Mobile platform will likely be a much bigger deal in emerging markets, where they already use the Snapdragon 200-tier processors quite a bit.
The changes here aren’t huge, and at first they’ll be a bit confusing for most people. But in the long run, Qualcomm is hoping that this will make it easier to differentiate between all of their products. This is also the first step for Qualcomm in the move beyond the typical smartphone, tablet, smartwatch and VR segments. As they are looking to power other devices, in fact Qualcomm already announced that they have a chipset that is capable of running full Windows 10 (not an ARM, slimmed down version), which is definitely exciting. With the smartphone market plateauing, it’s important for companies, even suppliers like Qualcomm, to expand past mobile.