Nearly four years after the introduction of the Snapdragon 212, Qualcomm today introduced its newest 200-series chipset.
The Qualcomm 215 is now official, and it offers many upgrades over the Snapdragon 212. It's got a quad-core ARM Cortex A53 CPU and a 64-bit CPU architecture, and Qualcomm says the 215 offers up to 50 percent increased CPU performance over its predecessor. There's an Adreno 308 GPU included, too, which offers up to 28 percent increased gaming performance.
Another notable feature of the Qualcomm 215 is its dual ISPs, which is a first for Qualcomm's 200-series. This means it can support dual cameras. The Qualcomm 215 also supports up to 13MP photos.
Packing in dual ISPs isn't the only 200-series first that the Qualcomm 215 can claim, as it's also the first chipset in that family to support HD+ display resolutions, the first 200-series chipset to support Ultra HD voice calls and Dual SIM with Dual VoLTE, and the first to support 802.11ac. The Qualcomm 215 is the first 200-series chipset to support NFC payments on Android, too.
Rounding out the Qualcomm 215's feature set is support for Bluetooth 4.2, Quick Charge, and LTE peak download and upload speeds of 150Mbps and 50Mbps, respectively.
Qualcomm says that we can expect the first Qualcomm 215-equipped devices to arrive in the second half of 2019. While its feature set may not sound all that exciting to folks who are used to flagship smartphones, the Qualcomm 215 looks like it could be a big deal for entry-level phones, enabling lots of new features for affordable handsets.