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Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 660 and 630 mobile platforms bring high-end features to the mid-range

By Anton Arsenov

Updated: May 09, 2017, 9:56 AM

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Processors

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 660 and 630 mobile platforms bring high-end features to the mid-range

Improved performance, enhanced photography, better connectivity, and longer battery life – these are some of the main promises of the new Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630 mobile platforms that Qualcomm has announced today. According to the company, the new chipsets are created to bring “more affordable high quality features for more smartphones and tablets, with little compromise on power”. The Snapdragon 660 is a successor of the Snapdragon 653 SoC, and the new Snapdragon 630 is an improved version of the 626 model, but both of them should give users significant improvements in several key areas.

Performance

As we expected before, the Snapdragon 660 chipset is built using the 14nm FinFET process, but unlike its 28 nm predecessor, the Snapdragon 653, it makes use of new Kryo 260 CPU cores. They work in the usual 4+4 configuration, in which the faster 2,2 GHz cores take care of the heavy-duty tasks, while the lighter ones are served by the other four cores running at a clock speed of 1.9GHz. Qualcomm claims the Kryo 260 CPU has up to 20% higher performance than the previous generation.

For the first time in the company’s 600 series platform, the Snapdragon 660 also makes use of the Adreno 512 GPU, which promises 30% improvement in graphics performance compared to the previous generation, the Adreno 510 GPU. The Snapdragon 630, on the other hand, comes with a 30% increase inGPU performance with the Adreno 508 and a 10% more CPU performance than the Snapdragon 625 processor, according to the company’s data. Both new chips support up to 8GB maximum memory.

Additional improvement is that Snapdragon 660 and 630 provide Vulkan API support as well as integrated 4K video capture and playback capabilities. This means that users can record high-definition videos at 30 frames per second, straight from the device.

Photography

Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and 630 support the company’s Spectra 160 camera image signal processor (ISP). This chip should improve our photographic experience by producing more natural skin tones with focus on low light photography and improved power efficiency.

The new ISP comes also with improved support for dual cameras as well as features such as smooth optical zoom, bokeh effects, dual pixel autofocus, and improved video stabilization.

Connectivity

Qualcomm’s new chips feature a Snapdragon X12 modem that is claimed to offer up to 600Mbps of downlink data rates. The Snapdragon 660 comes with support for 2×2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which the company says offers twice as much data throughput and up to 60% lower download power consumption, when compared to the Snapdragon 652.
Both of the new chips also support Bluetooth 5.0, which has four times the range and twice the transmission speed of the previous Bluetooth 4.2 technology.

Power efficiency

With Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630, the Qualcomm Quick Charge 4 technology is now coming to the company’s 600 series of SoCs as well. It is claimed to offer 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.

Machine learning

With the new mobile chips, Qualcomm allows developers and OEMs to use machine learning to power user experiences by using Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK and offers support for the open source TensorFlow, Caffe, and Caffe2 machine learning software frameworks. All of these software tools will be supported by the CPU, GPU, and Qualcomm’s Hexagon digital signal processor (DSP), as well as its HVX vector extensions.

Availability

The Snapdragon 660 is already available to device makers, while the Snapdragon 630 will be available towards the end of this month, Qualcomm says. According to recent speculations, the chip will power the new dual-camera Samsung Galaxy C we told you about a week ago. Other phones that are rumored to employ the Snapdragon 660 include the Xiaomi Redmi Pro 2, Xiaomi Mi Max 2, Oppo R11, Vivo X9s Plus, and the Nokia 7 and Nokia 8. We don’t know yet which phone models will use the Snapdragon 630.

source: Qualcomm via Android Auhtority