Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 660 and 630 mobile platforms

Qualcomm announced two new mid-range 'mobile platforms' today. The Snapdragon 660 and 630 are both designed for mid-range smartphones and should offer a big boost in performance over the current Snapdragon 653 and 625 models, thanks to new advanced photography features, enhanced gaming, as well as boosts to battery life efficiency and faster LTE speeds.

Snapdragon 660

Starting with the higher-end Snapdragon 660, which replaces the 653 SoC, the biggest change here is a new, more efficient 14nm process, down from 28nm on the 653. Qualcomm has also introduced its Kryo 260 cores in the 660, rather than the octa-core ARM Cortex-A72 and A53 big.LITTLE combination seen in the 653.

Qualcomm has yet to give full specifics on what's inside the Kyro 260, but we know it uses a similar 4+4 octa-core arrangement as its predecessor with four larger cores clocked at 2.2GHz with 1MB of L2 cache, while the little cores have their own 1MB L2 cache and are clocked at 1.8GHz.

The GPU on the 660 has also been upgraded with a more powerful Adreno 512 GPU, up from the 510 seen in the 653 model.

Other features inside the 660 include an improved X12 LTE modem, Quick Charge 4, Bluetooth 5, USB Type-C with 3.1 speed compatibility, an improved Spectra 160 ISP with EIS 3.0, 2×2 WiFi, and the company’s Hexagon 642 DSP unit with All-Ways Aware technology and HVX.

For consumers, this means improved support for dual camera hardware and enhanced image processing capabilities, such as optical zoom and Clear Sight sensor arrangements, eye tracking, and depth mapping. Qualcomm has also said that the increased power efficiency of the 660 should give users an extra two hours of battery life compared to the 653.

The Snapdragon 660 is already available to device manufacturers with devices expected to appear on the market within the next few months.

Snapdragon 630

The lower-end Snapdragon 630 replaces the existing Snapdragon 625, and is also built on a 14nm process. The Snapdragon 630 uses the same octa-core ARM Cortex-A53 configuration as before, but with a slightly higher 2.2GHz peak clock speed for a 10 percent boost to performance over the 625.

The GPU on the 630 has also been upgraded, going from an Adreno 506 to the 508. The 630 also features faster 2×16 LPDDR4X memory with a maximum clock speed of 1333MHz, which should also increase gaming performance.

Other improvements to the 630 mobile platform include a new X12 LTE modem, Spectra 160 ISP, support for QXGA (2048 x 1536) displays, Quick Charge 4, USB Type-C with 3.1 speeds, Bluetooth 5, All-Ways Aware support, and a Hexagon DSP but without the HVX extensions. Having said that, even without HVX support, both of Qualcomm’s new platforms can use Qualcomm's machine learning algorithms through the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK.

“With the introduction of the Snapdragon 660 and 630 Mobile Platforms, we are thrilled that features such as improved image quality and fast LTE speeds will now be available in a wide array of devices without sacrificing performance or quality,” said Kedar Kondap, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “This ensures that a greater number of consumers will be able to take advantage of higher quality user experiences in camera, audio and visual processing, connectivity, improved CPU and GPU performance, fast charging, security and machine learning.”

The Snapdragon 630 will be available to manufacturers at the end of May, with the first devices scheduled to hit stores later in the year.

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