QUALCOMM AIN’T ONE to sit on its backside as the chipmaker has revealed the Snapdragon 675, a top-end chipset for its mid-range…
QUALCOMM AIN’T ONE to sit on its backside as the chipmaker has revealed the Snapdragon 675, a top-end chipset for its mid-range SoCs.
While the 600-series of Snapdragon chips have so far slipped into mid-range to budget smartphones, the new Snapdragon 675 looks like its bringing more flagship features normally found in the high-end Snapdragon 845.
The Snapdragon 675 makes use of Qualcomm’s new Kryo 460 architecture, which uses ARM CortexA76 processor core, normally found in flagship phones. In fact, the use of said ARM cores is a first for Qualcomm, with the other notable chipset that uses them being Huawei’s seemingly might Kirin 980.
Getting into the silicon tacks, the Snapdragon 875 is based on an 11-nanometre process and rocks a quad-core design.
Those cores are set up in ARM’s big. LITTLE formation, with two high-performance cores clocking up to 2GHz to take care of demanding apps and tasks, and six cores running at 1.7GHz for day-to-day smartphone tasks. The idea here is to offer decent performance without having a chipset that gobbles up battery power.
But the more interesting side of the Snapdragon 675 is how it packs in more chipset features one would normally expect in a high-end chip. Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4+ is present and correct, there’s support for multiple camera setups, and the chipmaker’s beefed-up artificial intelligence engine has been plonked into the SoC.
This means the smart and handy features normally reserved for smartphones that cost north of £500, or indeed push the £900 mark, could find their way into cheaper handsets. We’re already seeing phones like the Nokia 7.1 sport smarter chops while not using an 800-series Snapdragon.
The Snapdragon 675 is expected early 2019, so we can assume that the normal batch of mid-tier smartphones revealed early in the year, will come sporting the chipset.
That’ll be good news for folks on a budget, and it could mean the next wave of flagship phones will really need to pull something special out of the box in order to widen the gap between them and their cheaper brethren. µ
