Qualcomm has announced two new mobile platforms, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630, during an event held in Singapore. Both the platforms are the successor of the Snapdragon 653 and Snapdragon 625 processors respectively.
The Snapdragon 660 Mobile Platform is now shipping and the Snapdragon 630 Mobile Platform will begin shipping towards the end of this month. Both platforms use a 14nm FinFET process and provide 4K video capture and playback capabilities, along with 8GB maximum memory and Vulkan API support. Additionally, the Snapdragon 660 Mobile Platform supports displays up to QHD (2K) resolution, whereas the 630 supports FHD/QXGA (1080p).
Speaking of the sheer hardware, the company says that Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 comes loaded with 64-bit octa-core Kyro 260 CPU clocked at 2.2GHz and has 30 percent improved Adreno 512 GPU. Snapdragon 630 on the other hand, also sports octa cores but has ARM Cortex A53 CPU, which can be clocked up to 2.2GHz. The Snapdragon 630 offers a 30 percent increase in the Adreno 508 GPU performance over its predecessor.
The company says that both the mobile platforms are “designed to support a leap in performance enabling advanced photography and enhanced gaming, in addition to long battery life and fast LTE speeds.” Both the platforms takes the leverage of Qualcomm Spectra 160 camera ISP, which has improved photographic image quality for more natural skin tones, superior low-light photography, as well as better power efficiency and higher “throughput for dual camera smartphones”. It also supports features like optical zoom, bokeh effects, dual Pixel autofocus, and improved camcorder video stabilisation.
For connectivity, both the Snapdragon 660 and 630 feature a Snapdragon X12 LTE Modem, paired with the new SDR660 RF transceiver, which supports peak downlink data rates of 600Mbps to the 600-tier lineup of SOCs for the first time. The Snapdragon 660 supports 2×2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi for twice as much data throughput and up to 60 percent lower download power consumption as the Snapdragon 652. Both platforms also feature Bluetooth 5 support, which doubles the amount of data that devices can transfer compared to the previous iteration.
Also, the Snapdragon 660 and 630 Mobile Platforms feature Quick Charge 4.0 technology, which supports up to 5 hours of Talk time in just 5 minutes of charging and up to 50 percent battery life in just 15 minutes of charging. Then there is Qualcomm Mobile Security, which provides security focused hardware-based protection, user authentication and device attestation on the mobile device.
Snapdragon 660 platform features Hexagon 680 DSP that enables high performance, power efficient processing of imaging, computer vision, and machine intelligence workloads. Both platforms also support Qualcomm All-Ways Aware technology with support for the Google Awareness API. This technology provides Qualcomm Technologies’ next generation of always-on contextual experiences and uses a very low power running on the Hexagon DSP.