Qualcomm has announced a new mobile processor, the Snapdragon 675. The company introduced this mid-range processor at its 4G/5G Summit. The Snapdragon 675 has been manufactured using an 11nm process (LPP process), and it offers a number of improvements over the Snapdragon 670, notes Qualcomm. This SoC is based on two performance Cortex-A76 cores, and 6 efficiency cores based Cortex-A55 cores. Qualcomm says that a number of specific games and game engines have been optimized for the Snapdragon 675, including Unity, Unreal, Messiah, and NeoX. This SoC also supports popular tools and APIs, including Vulkan, OpenGL 3.2, OpenCL, and Snapdragon profiler. The Qualcomm Spectra 200 series ISP is also included in the package, while the SoC supports a triple camera configuration in the front or back, while it supports features such as telephoto, wide angle, and super-wide image capture. On top of that, enhanced portrait mode (Bokeh) is also supported, 3D face unlock and “epic” selfies, as Qualcomm refers to them. The SoC also supports recording slow motion in HD, it provides “limitless slo-mo”, says Qualcomm.
The Snapdragon 675 comes with a multi-core AI engine which is made to deliver up to 50-percent overall performance improvement when it comes to AI applications. The Snapdragon X12 modem that is included in the package supports downlink speeds up to 600Mbps, and 3x carrier aggregation, while Quick Charge 4+ support is also included here. The Snapdragon 675 supports up to 8GB of memory, 2×16 bit LPDDR4X at 1,866MHz. The Adreno 612 GPU is here for graphics processing, while the Spectra 250 IPS is here for imaging (up to a 25-megapixel single camera, 16-megapixel dual camera, up to 48-megapixel snapshot. Up to 4K video capture at 30FPS, up to 1080p video capture at 120FPS. This chip supports up to fullHD+ (2520 x 1080) displays, and up to 4K external display support. The Qualcomm Hexagon 658 DSP, and Qualcomm’s All-Ways Aware technology is also supported by this chip, same goes for Dual SIM Dual VoLTE (DSDV). During the announcement, Qualcomm did mention that the Snapdragon 675 is now available, and that it is expected to start showing up in consumer devices in the first quarter of next year.
Background: The Snapdragon 675 is a direct successor to the Snapdragon 670 processor which was introduced back in August. As you can see, this chip brings a number of improvements across the board, and even though it’s not a huge leap over the Snapdragon 670 in terms of performance, it surely is an improvement. The Snapdragon 600-series processors belong in the mid-range sector of mobile chips that Qualcomm releases, these chips are a step above the Snapdragon 400-series, and are inferior to the Snapdragon 800-series processors.
Impact: The Snapdragon 675 is expected to become available in a number of mid-range smartphones next year, and Qualcomm seems to have some deals in place already, as the company has announced that we’ll start seeing Snapdragon 675-based devices in the first half of next year. It remains to be seen what the company will utilize this chip first, but quite a few of them will probably get a board next year.