Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 holds key for smarter, more capable mid-range phones in future

Chipset giant Qualcomm on Tuesday announced new Snapdragon 675 mobile platform. The new chipset comes at a time when mid-range phones are burdened with the expectations of delivering flagship phone-level performance, and even camera quality. Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 SoC takes the baton from the popular Snapdragon 660 that powers phones like Realme 2 Pro and Xiaomi Mi A2 among others.

The chipset is also an incremental boost from the recently launched Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 processor which is yet to go mainstream in the commercial market. One of the most prominent devices to run Snapdragon 670 is Oppo R17.

That said, Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 SoC has three key focus areas - performance, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and camera. Let's begin with performance.

For gaming enthusiasts, Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 brings higher frame-rate along with optimisation for specific games and game engines such as Unity, Unreal, Messiah, and NeoX. Qualcomm has also included tools and APIs, including Vulkan, OpenGL 3.2, OpenCL, and Snapdragon profiler in the new chipset.

Powered by Snapdragon X12 modem, Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 paves way for carrier aggregation technology in mid-range phones. The modem is said to support downlink speeds up to 600Mbps and 3x carrier aggregation. The chipset also includes Qualcomm's new Quick Charge 4+. Other key features include advanced aptX and Aqstic audio technologies, and DSP security for improved and secured facial recognition. New architecture built on Arm Cortex technology is said to boost overall performance by 20%.

This means future mid-range and most probably budget phones will be capable of delivering faster internet speeds, more chipset-level security, and most importantly support for high-end and graphic-intensive games.

Qualcomm has been working to bring smarter machine algorithms to wider number of chipsets. While it's previous generation chipsets and even the flagships have the AI and ML capabilities, Snapdragon 675 holds the key for pushing the native AI support in future mass products.

The chipset has a multi-core AI Engine which is said to deliver up to 50% overall improvements in AI applications.

"The multi-core AI Engine is designed to improve mobile devices' ability to acquire information and become the ultimate personal assistant by capturing photos and videos, learning and adapting to a user's voice, and optimizing battery life," said Qualcomm.

"Through heterogenous computing, the Hexagon DSP, Adreno GPU, and Kryo CPU- are engineered to work cooperatively to run AI applications on-device faster and more efficiently. Additional AI use cases supported on Snapdragon 675 include camera (scene and object detection, image style transfer, portrait relighting), security (face unlock, payment security), voice and translation. Global ISVs also support the platform including Megvii (Face++), NetEase, SenseTime, Thundersoft, and Trio.AI," it added.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 also solves poor camera experience on a few mid-range phones. Even as modern mid-range phones like Mi A2 deliver quite impressive image quality, they still struggle when it comes to low-light or depth sensing. Snapdragon 675 now brings support for triple camera set up on the phones - a new trend that is believed to become big in the near future. Already, Samsung has launched phones with triple and quad cameras.

With the chipset, expect future phones to support telephoto, wide angle, and super-wide image capture.

"Additionally, Snapdragon 675 provides limitless slo-mo - capable of recording extended slo-mo video clips in HD, not limited to one second or shorter bursts," explained Qualcomm.