Industry Expert Blogs

Earlier this week, Chinese baseband chipset vendor Spreadtrum announced a new family of single-core 32-bit SoCs for smartphones. Yes, you read that correctly, single-core 32-bit SoCs for smartphones. In the age of the golden iPhone and phabets, we often forget that not everyone is going to pay several hundred dollars for a phone.

The first products to be released are the SC7715 and SC6815. The SC7715 is a highly integrated baseband SoC that features an ARM Cortex-A7 CPU, ARM Mali-400 GPU, dedicated audio codec, integrated power management unit (PMU), support for WCDMA/HSPA+ and EDGE/GPRS/GSM, and a complement of wireless interfaces, including 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and FM. The new device also supports up to a 5MP camera, 720p video, and display resolution up to WVGA. The SC6815 is an EDGE only device.

The new devices are using the smallest of ARM's big.LITTLE cores, and older generation GPU, and do not support the latest image sensor resolutions, displays, or wireless standards. In a world of mobile SoCs that rival the performance of PC processors, why should this even matter?

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