Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 675, the latest addition to the company’s growing lineup of 600-series chipsets for mid to high-end smartphones and tablets.
With its latest system-on-a-chip (SoC), Qualcomm says focused its attention on three areas: gaming, camera performance and artificial intelligence.
On the gaming front, the 675’s combination of hardware and software capabilities allows it to deliver 90 percent fewer “janks” in gaming applications, according to Qualcomm. Essentially, despite its position as a mid-range chipset, what Qualcomm is promising here is that the 675 will be more than enough for even the most demanding mobile games.
Indeed, in terms of processing power, the company says the 675 is 30 percent faster at launching games and 35 percent faster when browsing the web, compared to the company’s previous generation 600-tier SoC.
When it comes to the 675’s camera capabilities, the new chipset, thanks to the inclusion of Qualcomm’s second-generation Spectra 250 image signal processor, is capable of concurrently supporting up to three cameras for 5x optical zoom. Support for popular computational photography features like portrait mode is also built into the chip. Moreover, the chipset can handle unlimited slow-motion video capture at 480 frames per second and 720p. The latter is a new feature for a 600-tier chipset.
On the AI front, features like facial authentication are three times faster thanks to the 675’s hardware. Additionally, the chipset is able to complete tasks related to the needs of voice assistants in low-power mode.
Besides enhancements in gaming, camera and AI performance, the 675 features in improvements in other major areas, as well.
Specifically, the chipset includes the company’s X12 modem, which supports three carrier aggregation and is capable of theoretical download speeds of up to 600Mbps. On the connectivity front, the 675 also supports Wi-Fi 802.11ac, with 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 60GHz tri-band compatibility (Qualcomm just last week announced new 60GHz Wi-Fi chips). There’s also support for low-power Bluetooth 5.0 and the company’s aptX wireless audio codec.
According to Qualcomm, the first Snapdragon 675-equipped smartphones will ship early next year.
At the same event at which it announced the Snapdragon 675, the company also announced a new version of its upcoming mmWave 5G-capable wireless antenna.
