Qualcomm, at its tech event earlier today announced their next generation mid-range mobile chipsets. Dubbed as the Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630 Mobile Platforms, they come as an upgrade over last year’s Snapdragon 653 and 625 SoCs respectively. The new platforms will bring better battery life, faster LTE connectivity, and better clock speed.
One thing that comes to everyone’s mind when speaking about the Snapdragon 625 and 626 platforms, is the kind of battery life smartphones with these chipsets offered. The newly announced Snapdragon 660 and 630 are both built on 14nm manufacturing process, meaning the Snapdragon 660 will also provide better battery life.
Qualcomm claims that the platforms will lower the power consumption by 50 to 75 percent while using location services and 60 percent power will be saved while downloading over Wi-Fi when compared to the previous generations.
Another biggest addition in both the platforms is the presence of X12 LTE modem, which was seen on the Snapdragon 820 SoC initially. The X12 LTE modem has the capability to deliver speeds up to 600 Mbps. These mobile platforms will now come with Bluetooth 5.0, and the Snapdragon 660 has 2 x 2 MIMO Wi-Fi, but the Snapdragon 630 lacks it.
Qualcomm said that the Snapdragon 660 would have 20 percent faster clock speed than the Snapdragon 653, whereas the Snapdragon 630 features 10 percent faster CPU than the Snapdragon 626.
Coming to the RAM, the platforms can handle up to 8GB of RAM. The Snapdragon 660 platform has an octa-core Kryo 260 CPU and upgraded Adreno 512 GPU. The Snapdragon 630 features eight Cortex A53 cores, accompanied by an Adreno 508 GPU.
With these platforms, Qualcomm is bringing the machine learning technology to its mid-tier chips as well. They also have support for Qualcomm’s latest fast charging technology - Quick Charge 4.0. Qualcomm has improved the camera processing as well in the two new mobile platforms.
“With the introduction of the Snapdragon 660 and 630 Mobile Platforms, we are thrilled that features such as improved image quality and fast LTE speeds will now be available in a wide array of devices without sacrificing performance or quality. This ensures that a greater number of consumers will be able to take advantage of higher quality user experiences in camera, audio and visual processing, connectivity, improved CPU and GPU performance, fast charging, security, and machine learning,” said Kedar Kondap, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies.
Finally, Qualcomm stated that devices with Snapdragon 660 would ship by the end of June 2017, whereas the Snapdragon 630 can be seen in devices starting Q3 2017.
