Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 678 chipset, a successor to its Snapdragon 675 which debuted back in 2018. The new SoC promises to offer better photography and connectivity capabilities, while at the same time ensuring battery usage efficiency on upcoming mid-range smartphones.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 678 is built on the 11nm LLP process and shares some similarities to its predecessor. The major difference being the overclocked Cortex A76 cores in its Kryo 460 CPUs, which is able to reach up to 2.2GHz in processing speed – about 0.2GHz faster than the one found on the 675. The company says that its onboard Adreno 612 GPU will see improved performance as well.
The new chipset features a Spectra 250L ISP, X12 LTE Modem, and Hexagon 685 DSP. The latter is said to support advanced carrier aggregation with downloads up to 600 Mbps and uploads up to 150 Mbps. In addition, connectivity on the Snapdragon 678 also supports all major cellular modes plus Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) for increased capacity.
The SoC is capable of enabling phones to display pixel resolutions of up to 2520 x 1080 and 10-bit colour. Lastly, it can support up to 48MP for primary cameras and 16MP for front-facing cameras, with 4K video recording functionality at 30fps on HEVC codec.
At the time of writing, Qualcomm has not revealed what upcoming mid-range smartphones will feature the new Snapdragon 678 chipset. But given its recent unveiling, it won’t be long before phone makers will announce their new mid-rangers which will be equipped with the new SoC.
