Hot on the heels of the flagship Snapdragon 888 chip, Qualcomm has announced another addition to its Snapdragon 600 series chip family. It’s called the Snapdragon 678 and comes in as the successor to the Snapdragon 675 from 2018. The chip will be available for all midrange phones but given the highly competitive market, you could soon see it in affordable phones priced under Rs 15,000. The specifications remain largely unchanged, however.
Based on the paper, the Snapdragon 678 is 95 percent identical to the Snapdragon 675. The only difference lies in the clock speeds. The Snapdragon 678 is clocked at 2.2GHz whereas the Snapdragon 675 was clocked at 2GHz. Rest of the GPU, ISP, and even the CPU cores remain unchanged. It continues to use the Snapdragon X12 LTE modem capped to download speeds of 600Mbps. Qualcomm says the chip is designed to offer better battery life and fast connectivity.
Snapdragon 678 announced
The Snapdragon 678 comes with the Kryo 260 CPU cores clocked at 2.2GHz along with the Adreno 612 GPU. There’s also the Spectra 250L ISP with support for 4K video recording while the X12 LTE model offers download speeds up to 600Mbps and upload speeds of up to 160Mbps.
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In comparison to some of the other Snapdragon 600 series chips, the Snapdragon 678 offers superior performance to the Snapdragon 665 and Snapdragon 662 chips. With most OEMs now moving to the Snapdragon 700 series and MediaTek’s G series chips, we could see the Snapdragon 675 in many affordable phones mostly priced under Rs 15,000. Qualcomm hasn’t released any exact date as to when can we expect the phones with this chip.
Prior to the Snapdragon 678, Qualcomm came up with the Snapdragon 750G chip for mid-range phones. We saw this chip earlier in the Motorola Moto G 5G, with support for 5G network bands and some significant performance boosts over the Snapdragon 730G chip. MediaTek also announced recently that it is collaborating with OEMs in India to bring 5G phones in the affordable segment. The company said we could be seeing Dimensity 800U powered phones by January 2021.
The Dimensity 800U and Snapdragon 750G are very close to each other in terms of performance. However, MediaTek always has a price advantage over Qualcomm chips, and hence, we could see 5G phones becoming more accessible. With Reliance Jio promising the arrival of 5G in India by 2021, watching the smartphone market will be interesting in the days to come.