Qualcomm may have given us the beastly Snapdragon 835 at the beginning of this year, but the chipmaker has today takes the wraps off the processors that’ll power a majority of budget smartphones going forward. The Snapdragon 660 and 630 mobile platform has been designed to provide mid-tier devices the bang for the buck — AI on chip, dual camera support, Bluetooth 5 and X12 LTE Modem among other things.
These mobile chipsets, Snapdragon 660 and 630, are upgrades to the previous-gen Snapdragon 653 and 625 respectively. These new mobile platforms are more powerful, robust, and feature-packed as compared to the previous iterations. They have faster processing power, better graphics, connectivity, and battery life — which has been touted by the American chipmaker to last one whole day. The said chipsets have basically been designed to provide a premium experience and features even in budget smartphones.
Talking about these chips, Kedar Kondap, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. said,
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.
As for the prominent specs, the new mobile platforms are more powerful and exhibit faster processing capabilities — they’re built via the 14nm process.The Snapdragon 660 features a 20 percent increase in CPU performance, coupled with a 30 percent improvement in Adreno 512 GPU performance. The Snapdragon 630 features a 10 percent improvement in CPU speeds and a 30 percent increase in Adreno 508 GPU performance over its predecessor.
This increment in processing power not only enables the chipset to render better graphics and multimedia support but also consume less battery power. This is where Qualcomm’s latest budget mobile platforms excel. They are coupled with Quick Charge 4 technology to instantly charge up you smartphones — 50 percent in 15 minutes. The chipmaker added that users will witness lower consumption of power, about 50-75% less for location services and 60% down for WiFi services on the Snapdragon 660.
Further, these chipsets may have been built for the budget segment but pack features at par with the latest and great Qualcomm chip, i.e Snapdragon 835. It enables developers to use the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK to build machine learning solutions, adds support for hardware-based mobile security, Spectra 160 premium camera ISP to provide improved image processing abilities to these chipsets. This means you can even include dual camera setups in budget devices. The Hexagon 680 DSP gives the SD 660 a push towards improved visual and audio processing.
Both of Qualcomm’s newest mobile platforms (a naming scheme change debuted very recently) are built upon the same architecture. The Snapdragon 660 has an eight-core Kryo 260 CPU and an Adreno 512 GPU, while Snapdragon 630 brings along eight Cortex A53 cores and a lower-end Adreno 508 GPU. They both support up to 8GB of RAM, SD X12 LTE Modem with the new RF transceiver and Bluetooth 5 by default. The SD 660 also includes 2×2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi — improved wireless network.
In the official blog post, Qualcomm states that the Snapdragon 660 mobile platform is now available whereas the Snapdragon 630 mobile platform will be rolled out later this month. These chipsets will eventually make their way into the budget, around ₹12k-18k, smartphones in the coming months.
