Earlier this year Qualcomm took the wraps off of the new Snapdragon 700-series chips, but it turns out the addition of the 700-series was never aimed at replacing the 600 series. In fact, the company has just unveiled a new 600-series chip — the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675.
The new chip is aimed at bringing some of Qualcomm’s more premium features to lower-cost phones, including optimization for gaming — where Qualcomm says it was able to reduce stutters by up to 90 percent. Apart from that, the chipset features the Qualcomm Spectra 250L image signal processor, which supports camera sensors of up to 48 megapixels, portrait mode, 5x optical zoom, and so on.
Qualcomm is also touting the artificial intelligence of the chipset. According to the company, the chip improves on A.I. performance by up to 50 percent, and the included A.I. engine is optimized to do things like adapt to a user’s voice.
“Packed with advanced gaming abilities, remarkable camera performance and a multi-core AI Engine, Snapdragon 675 based smartphones will bring new experiences to consumers globally,” Qualcomm said in a statement.
When it comes to raw processing power, the chipset offers eight Kryo 460 CPUs with a clock speed of up to 2.0GHz. Six of those cores are built for efficiency and as such, the chip will improve on battery life when using them. Then, when higher performance is needed, the two performance cores will kick in. That is not bad for what will ultimately be a midrange chip. According to Qualcomm, the chip will likely end up in phones in the $350 to $500 range — and while that’s a pretty wide price range, it does differentiate the chip from 700-series devices, which seem to come at slightly more expensive phones aimed at offering a premium phone experience without the $800-plus price tag that comes with flagship phones these days.
As you would expect from a Qualcomm chip, there is a heavy emphasis on the modem involved too — it features the Snapdragon X12 modem, which supports download speeds of up to 600Mbps. You will also get support for Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4+, which can charge a battery from zero to 50 percent in 15 minutes, though that will vary depending on the size of the battery.
We’re not quite sure exactly when phones will start popping up with the new Snapdragon 675, though based on Qualcomm’s previous track record, it’s likely we’ll see phones with the new chip within a few months.
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