Qualcomm, a leading mobile system-on-chip (SoC) manufacturer, has announced a new naming convention for its venerable Snapdragon family of SoCs.
With the announcement, the company will be separating the Qualcomm and Snapdragon brands going forward, with Snapdragon being a standalone product brand with specific ties to the Qualcomm brand where appropriate. More importantly, the Snapdragon naming scheme will adopt a single-digit nomenclature instead of the current three-digit numbering system. Prior generations of products have their product tier, generation, and revision denoted using three numbers. In addition, the Snapdragon fireball icon will be more prominent in the new naming.
At the time of writing, it’s unclear how the company plans on differentiating between different series. But in conjunction with the number change, Qualcomm has introduced new “representative colours” for Snapdragon, including Midnight, Gunmetal, Nickel, Snapdragon Red, and Gold. It’s possible that the company plans on using different colours to denote the product tiers. This is made more plausible as Qualcomm mentioned that “gold will now be used to represent only our premium-tier products” across the Snapdragon portfolio.
That’s all just speculation, however, as the company remains tight-lipped on further details. Qualcomm is expected to elaborate on its renaming plan at its Snapdragon Tech Summit on Nov. 30.
