High-end processors are normally the most interesting ones. They've got all the coolest features, the best performance, and the most "new" stuff. They're the chips you'll find in expensive, premium, flagship products.

But the fact of the matter is that midrange and low-end chips do more volume than high-end parts—for most people, those products will be more important. Qualcomm is announcing a total of four new chips today in its mid-tier Snapdragon 600 and 400 lineups, all four of which will begin appearing in consumer devices this year.

As part of today's announcement, Qualcomm is also changing the branding on its various LTE modems. The old "Gobi" moniker is out, and "Snapdragon" is in. Standalone modems and modems integrated into Snapdragon SoCs will all be sold under the Snapdragon banner, and Qualcomm has introduced simplified model numbers to make it clearer what speeds you're getting from each modem.

Snapdragon 415 and 425

Something that Qualcomm is stressing with all of today's announcements is that high-end features are trickling down the product stack. For starters, both the new Snapdragon 415 and 425 will be moving to eight-core Cortex A53-based designs, rather than the quad-core designs the 400 and 410 used. Like the 410, both new 400-series chips are 64-bit and support the ARMv8 instruction set, and they're both built on a 28nm manufacturing process.

Other improvements are less about speed and more about extra value-added features, something we're seeing more of as the mobile SoC market matures. The SoCs have dual image signal processors (ISPs), which Qualcomm claims will improve cameras in these midrange and low-end phones. Qualcomm's Quick Charge 2.0 feature from the Snapdragon 410 also returns—we've evaluated Quick Charge 2.0 in previous reviews. It can charge a 2014 Moto X from zero to 80 percent in an hour, which would be pretty handy to have in a low-end phone.

On the graphics side, both SoCs step up to the Adreno 405 GPU, the same graphics processor that ships with the Snapdragon 610 and 615. Neither of those chips have proven incredibly popular with OEMs—it looks like it's gotten squeezed out by the 410 on the low end and the 800-series at the high end—so we haven't benchmarked it ourselves, but it doesn't appear to be much faster than the Adreno 306 in the Snapdragon 410. Its real benefit, again, comes from value-adds: DirectX 11.2 support for Windows devices and hardware decode support for 1080p H.265 video (up from 720p in the 410). Maximum resolution for integrated displays remains the same at 1920×1200, while external display support jumps from 720p to 1080p.

Aside from CPU core counts, the chief difference between the 415 and 425 is LTE speed. The 415 includes the X5 LTE modem, which supports download and upload speeds of 150Mbps and 50Mbps respectively. The 425 comes with the X8 modem, which increases that to 300Mbps down and 100Mbps up. If you've never heard those names before, don't worry—they're new labels for old things, and we'll run through them soon.

The Snapdragon 415 is sampling to partners now and will begin showing up in phones in the first half of this year. The 425 will show up in devices in the second half of 2015.