Qualcomm has launched two new mobile platforms dubbed as Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630. Both the SoCs (silicon on chip) are designed to offer features like advanced photography, better gaming experience, long battery life and fast LTE speeds to mid-range and mainstream phones. This means Qualcomm is aiming to provide good performance phones at much more affordable prices.
The two new processors claim to provide higher LTE and WiFi speeds, enhanced image processing speed and support up to 24-megapixel cameras. Budget phones can now also hope for better GPU speed and support for Quick Charge 4.
The latest chips are manufactured using the same process as is used to manufacture Snapdragon 820 and 821 (a 14nm process). With the ability to capture and display 4K videos, Snapdragon 660 phones will also be able to support 2,560 x 1,440-pixel QHD displays.
These chips are said to have Spectra 160 premium camera ISP that is known to give natural skin tones and facilitate great low light photography. Other supported features with the processors are: bokeh effects, smooth optical zoom, dual pixel autofocus, and improved camcorder video stabilization.
The Snapdragon X12 LTE Modem on both the chips paired with the latest SDR660 RF transceiver gives the smartphones ability to support downlink data rates of 600Mbps. Snapdragon 660 has the ability to support 2×2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi to give twice as much data output as the Snapdragon 652.
Snapdragon 660 and 630 support up to 8GB of RAM. The 660 goes with an octa-core Kryo 260 CPU and an Adreno 512 GPU, while the 630 goes with eight Cortex A53 cores and an Adreno 508 GPU. Qualcomm has announced that the 660 has already started shipping while the 630 will start soon. Word is that Chinese makers like Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo will be the first ones to use it.
