Qualcomm just introduced the Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630 mobile platforms today; chipsets made for upper mid-range devices. Although they’re not quite as powerful or feature-packed as the company’s premium-tier Snapdragon 835 SoC, the Snapdragon 660 and 630 are plenty capable – they’re equipped with a slew of notable improvements too. Here are five of them.
1. Improved Battery Life
This is perhaps the most important improvement of the Snapdragon 660 and 630 chipsets. Aside from the fact that they’re built on the 14nm process – which improves power efficiency – Qualcomm also mentioned that power consumption for certain location services and downloading over WiFi have been improved.
Considering just how power efficient the Snapdragon 625 was, we imagine the Snapdragon 630 will return even more favourable battery life.
2. Up to 30% Performance Increase
Naturally, the Snapdragon 660 and 630 boast better performance than their predecessors. The Snapdragon 660, for one, features 30% and 20% increase in GPU and CPU performances respectively, thanks to its new Adreno 512 GPU and Kryo 260 CPU. It’s worth noting that this is the first time Qualcomm is using its custom Kryo cores on a 600-series chipset.
The Snapdragon 630, on the other hand, sees a more modest boost in performance. While its Adreno 508 GPU is said to offer up to 30% higher performance than the Snapdragon 626’s GPU, its CPU performance only improves by 10%. This isn’t all that surprising: the Snapdragon 630 still retains its predecessor’s eight Cortex-A53 cores, after all.
3. Bluetooth 5.0
Much like the premium-tier Snapdragon 835, both the Snapdragon 660 and 630 come with Bluetooth 5.0. Basically, consumers can expect to get better Bluetooth range with these two processors, along with twice as fast transfer speeds than Bluetooth 4.2 and the ability to connect up to two different devices at the same time.
4. Quick Charge 4.0
Aside from battery life, how quickly any given smartphone charges is becoming increasingly important in the eyes of consumers. Thankfully, the Snapdragon 660 and 630 supports Qualcomm’s new Quick Charge 4.0. According to the company, users can get up to five hours of battery life with only five minutes of charging – an impressive feat, if these chipsets can indeed deliver.
5. Faster LTE Speeds
Last but definitely not least is improved LTE performance. Thanks to the Snapdragon X12 LTE modem of the Snapdragon 660 and 630, consumers can get up to 600Mbps download speeds; that’s twice as fast as their predecessors’ speed, which tops at only 300Mbps.
Without a doubt the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630 are interesting upper mid-range chipsets, and it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing devices ship with either of these two mobile platforms. According to Qualcomm, we can expect to see phone makers announce their own Snapdragon 660-equipped devices sometime in June 2017.
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