Qualcomm 675 SoC set to bring high-end features to mid-range smartphones

Qualcomm has unveiled a new 600-series mid-range system-on-a-chip (SoC), designed to bring higher-end features to mid-range devices.

The octa-core Snapdragon 675 makes use of the Kryo 460 architecture, which uses a combination of ARM Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 cores, normally found in flagship (ie: expensive) phones. The device sits alongside the Snapdragon 670, and is intended to reduce the performance of the Snapdragon 710 and Snapdragon 845 and 850.

Manufactured on an 11nm process architecture, the four cores make use of ARM's big.LITTLE architecture, but in an asymetric formulation.

That is to say, there are two high-performance Cortex-A76 cores for (say) playing the mobile versions of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) or Fortnite, and six Cortex-A55 cores dialled down to 1.7GHz to handle the less demanding, frankly, more mundane everyday stuff.

Bundled into the package is the Adreno 612 GPU, which supports resolutions of up to 2,520×1,080, and support for up to 8MB of LPDDR4X memory.

More importantly, perhaps, for the mobile PUBG and Fortnite crowd, the Snapdragon will also support Unreal, Unity, NeoX and Messiah, and provide support for OpenGL 3.2, OpenCL and Vulkan.

Other high-end features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 will offer include the Snapdragon X12 modem, support for speeds of up to 600Mbps, support for Quick Charge 4+, support for multiple camera setups – thanks to the Qualcomm 250L signal signal processor – and Qualcomm's own artificial intelligence (AI) engine.

Support for multiple camera set-ups means triple cameras on both sides of the smartphone It also means support for 480FPS slow-motion recording.

Snapdragon 675-toting devices appearing in the first quarter of 2019.

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