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10nm Snapdragon 670 announced

by on08 August 2018


Strong AI play and new Kryo / Adreno 615

The Snapdragon 600 series has over 1450 designs and Qualcomm believes that the 660 has already been a success. Welcome, then, to te Snapdragon 670 that brings update to AI, performance, camera and multimedia.

Qualcomm wants you to remember that this is not a simple application processor. The Snapdragon chip comes with RF transceiver for connectivity, 802.11ac 2x2, Bluetooth, FM Radio and NFC for wireless, RF360 modules, Quick charge, Aqstic and security component.

The new Snapdragon 670 - a clear update to the 660 -  has 1.8 times faster AI performance compared to 660, updated Spectra 250 dual camera image sensor processor, Hexagon 685 DSP has eight Kryo 360 cores with up to 15 percent better performance compared to Snapdragon 660’s Kryo 260 cores. The 670 comes with Adreno 615. The Snapdragon 670 comes with the Snapdragon X12 600/ 150 Mbps capable LTE A modem supporting 3X Carrier aggregation and Bluetooth 5.0.

Kryo 360 cores debuted with Snapdragon 710 and they are based on the Cortex A75 and Cortex A55 combo and this is exactly what you can see with the Snapdragon 670. The main difference is that the 670 has maximal clock of 2.0 GHz / 1.7 GHz for A55 based silver cores compared to 2.2 GHz / 1.7 GHz with the Snapdragon 710.

SD670a

The Kryo 360 two big and six little cores are likely to bring enhanced software capability, faster browsing and smoother user interface as well as improved app launch time.

The Hexagon 685 is a key part of the AI play as the same DSP can be found in the Snapdragon 845 and 710. They complement the Adreno graphics and Kryo CPUs in solving the AI puzzle faster using the Snapdragon neural processing SDK, Android NNAPI or Hexagon Neural network tools and Caffe / Caffe 2, TensorFlow / TensorFlow lite or ONNX frameworks. AI performance is one of the key things that Google wants to exploit with Android 9 and OEMs want to use for their cameras, galleries and other neat features.

Spectra 250 ISP brings up the support for single 25 megapixel or dual 13 megapixel cameras and brings hardware accelerated multi frame noise reduction, super resolution, slow motion video capture with lower power and better quality compared to SD 660 and 30 percent lower power in Ultra HD 4K video capture.

This is a 10nm SoC - again an update compared to the SD 660 manufacture in 14nm. Adreno 615 GPU brings getter gaming performance and faster rendering on FHD+ display, Qualcomm Aqstic HI Fi audio experience and 4K capture and playback including audio zoom and sound focus.

The platform supports up to 8GB of LPDDR4X. It is hard not to draw parallels between Snapdragon 710 and 670 and the latter sounds like a slower version of the Performance chip chose by Xiaomi for Mi8 SE and Vive for Nex A mainstream phones. They target the "price is right" devices but the Snapdragon 670 should replace the very popular Snapdragon 660 that resulted in dozen of devices over the five quarters.

Devices based on Snapdragon 670 are expected later this year.

Last modified on 08 August 2018
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