Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 780G 5G chipset brings premium features to mid-range phones

Qualcomm's most recent chipset is a love letter to mid-range smartphones. The Snapdragon 780G 5G promises to bring many premium features, typically limited to top-tier phones, to mid-range handsets.

The new chipset is supposed to offer powerful AI and camera capture performance thanks to the manufacturer's Spectra 570 triple ISP (image signal processor) and 6th generation Qualcomm AI Engine. More importantly, the latest Snapdragon 7-series chipset allows smartphone makers to add a selection of premium-tier features to their products.

For example, the Snapdragon 780G 5G is the first 7-series chipset to feature a triple ISP that can capture from three cameras at the same time. On top of that, Qualcomm says its new chipset includes new low light architecture allowing for even better quality photos in any lighting condition.

Compared with the previous 7-series chipset, the new Snapdragon 780G delivers up to 12 TOPs AI performance, which is a 2x improvement. This means that everything you do with your smartphones (calls, video calls, connections) will be enhanced by AI to enable use cases such as AI-based noise suppression and better AI-based voice assistant interactions.

As far as the gaming aspect goes, Snapdragon 780G boasts a suite of select Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Gaming features, including updateable GPU (graphics processing unit) drivers, blazing-fast gaming, and True 10-bit HDR gaming.

The Snapdragon 780G is also about 5G, as the new chipset comes with a Snapdragon X53 5G Modem-RF system with peak download speeds of 3.3Gbps. One premium feature that will be brought by the Snapdragon 780G from the top-tier Snapdragon 888 chipset is the Wi-Fi 6 support and the Bluetooth audio features.

Specs-wise, the Snapdragon 780G 5G features six Kryo 670 cores, an Adreno 642 GPU, and support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+ technology. It's also fully compatible with FHD+ @ 144Hz displays and can offer up to 10-bit color depth, HDR10, and HDR10+.

According to Qualcomm, the first smartphones to be powered by its new Snapdragon 780G 5G chipset are expected to arrive in Q2 2021.