Qualcomm unveils two new Snapdragon processors for smartphones

Chipmaker Qualcomm has introduced two new mobile platforms, Snapdragon 660 and 630 which are designed to support advanced photography and enhanced gaming in addition to long battery life and fast LTE speeds.

Both platforms use a 14nm FinFET process and provide 4K video capture and playback capabilities, along with 8GB maximum memory and Vulkan API support.

"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," Kedar Kondap, Vice President, Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies Inc, told IANS.

The Snapdragon 660 mobile platform is the successor to the Snapdragon 653 and features a 20 per cent improvement in the Qualcomm Kryo 260 CPU and 30 per cent improvement in the Qualcomm Adreno 512 GPU performance.

The Snapdragon 630, which succeeds the Snapdragon 625, offers a 30 per cent increase in the Adreno 508 GPU performance over its predecessor, as well as a 10 per cent increase in CPU performance over its predecessor.

The Snapdragon 660 and 630 mobile platforms focus on camera, audio/visual processing, connectivity, improved CPU and GPU, security, machine learning and supports Quick Charge 4 which provides five hours of talk time in just five minutes of charging.

The Qualcomm Spectra 160 premium camera ISP supports 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.

The Qualcomm Hexagon 680 DSP featuring vector extensions (HVX) on the Snapdragon 660 mobile platform enables high performance, power efficient processing of imaging, computer vision, and machine intelligence workloads.

The Snapdragon 660 and 630 both feature a Snapdragon X12 LTE modem, paired with the new SDR660 RF transceiver, which support peak downlink data rates of 600Mbps to the 600-tier lineup of SOCs for the first time.

Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and developers can also power immersive and engaging user experiences with machine learning on the Snapdragon 660 and 630 mobile platforms using the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK.

The Snapdragon 660 mobile platform is now shipping and the Snapdragon 630 platform will begin shipping towards the end of May.