Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 660 and 630

Qualcomm has announced two new chips (Soc) at the Snapdragon Tech Day event held in Singapore- the Snapdragon 660 and 630. They are the successors to the Snapdragon 653 and 626 processors. They claim to provide a leap in performance enabling advanced photography and enhanced gaming. They also promise long battery life and fast LTE speeds. Without further ado, let's get into their features.

Snapdragon 660 is manufactured using the 14nm process, which Qualcomm previously used for Snapdragon 820 and 821. It replaces the A72/A53 cores for Snapdragon 653 with the Kryo 260 CPU which is expected to bring about a 20% improvement in performance. It also features the Adreno 512 GPU which ensures better gaming and multimedia experience by bringing a 30% improvement over the Adreno 510. The Spectra 160 premium camera ISP supports improved photographic image quality. The Qualcomm Hexagon 680 DSP featuring vector extensions (HVX) on the Snapdragon 660 mobile platforms enables higher performance and power efficient processing of imaging. It also supports 2x2 MU-MIMO Wi-Fi and X12 LTE for faster LTE speeds.. The Snapdragon 660 also features Quick Charge 4 which supports upto 5 hours of talktime in just 5 minutes of charging and upto 50% battery life on just 15 minutes of charging.

The Snapdragon 630 also features X12 LTE, Spectra 160 ISP and Quick Charge 4 like the Snapdragon 660. It uses an eight ARM reference A53s, just like the Snapdragon 626 but it introduces LPDDR4 support. It brings about a 10% increase in CPU performance. Snapdragon 630 replaces the Adreno 506 in Snapdragon 626 with Adreno 508 which brings a 30% improvement. There is also an increase in the resolution as Snapdragon 630 supports QXGA (1080p).

The Snapdragon 660 and 630 mobile platforms are software and pin compatible with the models they replace, so new devices will arrive more quickly. The Snapdragon 660 is available now and is expected to be used in the devices arriving soon while the Snapdragon 630 is unavailable until the end of May.