The mobile processors that were previously known as the Snapdragon 618 and the Snapdragon 620 are now known as Snapdragon 650 and Snapdragon 652, respectively. This is not how we typically see products rebranded. Normally, such as the desktop GPU market, individual products are carried between generations, and their model number is incremented to reflect that. This case is the exact opposite: Qualcomm feels that the new products are numbered too similar to existing models, so they're widening the gap between them.
An SoC is only useful if it is installed in a compelling device, though. While I would hope that these sorts of branding changes influence consumers more than device manufacturers, there exists a part of me that wonders how much this rebranding will affect their amount of design wins. You would think that bumping a model number up a few digits wouldn't affect experimentation at Samsung, LG, or other phone companies. Yet, it might, and that would be interesting to see. Either way, it should affect the semi-enthusiast phone users who buy based on breakdowns of tech specs.
It’s marketing! And only if
It’s marketing! And only if Qualcomm would list more information about its custom Kryo CPU/other core’s instruction decoder/execution resources will consumers actually Know if the renumbering scheme is actually warranted! Why is it that only the two main x86 licensees are willing to actually list their CPU core’s specifics. How much more execution resources does the custom ARMv8A ISA running Kryo core have over any of the Reference design Arm Holdings A53, A57, A72 cores.
If a company like Qualcomm wants the users to understand how much more powerful the new Kryo/other cores are then why is Qualcomm not more forthcoming with the Kryo’s/other CPU core specifications. That renumbering scheme is not going to help. Benchmarks are not enough when some of the custom ARMv8A ISA running cores have much more execution resources inside their custom micro-architectures. Just look at the amount of information there is listed for AMD’s x86 Zen CPU Core execution resources, and then ask Qualcomm and the other custom ARM ISA micro-architecture based SOC makers what is there to hide!