At its “A.I Day” conference in San Francisco, Qualcomm has announced a few new Snapdragon processors, with the Snapdragon 730G, Snapdragon 730 and Snapdragon 665 as new additions to the Snapdragon platform.
The Snapdragon 730G caught our attention because it caters to the nascent mobile gaming market which started to be heavily marketed in 2018 by several OEMs.
As more and more users worldwide, and especially in China, are using Mobile as their primary gaming platform, there is a push to sell handsets that are highly-capable at rendering extremely complex 3D to run the most cutting-edge games.
Obviously, this comes at a cost, and a lot of these Gaming-centric handsets are even more expensive than regular high-end phones. There are attempts at creating an affordable gaming phone, like the Honor Play, but Qualcomm wants to enable OEMs to push the envelope further.
Snapdragon 730G and Snapdragon 730
The 8-nm Snapdragon 730 is the technological foundation for the 730G (as the name indicates…). It is an octa-core processor (8x Kryo 470 CPUs at 2.2 GHz) that will occupy the same market segment as the Snapdragon 710 which was launched last year.
The 730 model comes with an Adreno 618 GPU and a complement of Qualcomm co-processors (Hexagon 688 DSP, Spectra 350 ISP, X15 4G LTE modem).
The 730G gets a 15% performance boost because it has been validated for a higher frequency (probably by a binning process at the chip-testing time) and is powerful enough to enable features normally reserved to the high-end:
- 960 FPS slow-motion video
- 4K display resolution (2560×1440)
- FPS Stuttering reduction
Some of those features are part of Snapdragon Elite Gaming, a set of functionalities originally introduced for Snapdragon 855 for high-end gaming and X-Reality applications.
Snapdragon 655
The 11-nm Snapdragon 655 processor is less focused about performance but is instead optimized to trickle down features into the mainstream. It is also an octa-core chip, although it has eight Kryo 260 CPUs instead of the faster Kryo 470 version. The graphics are powered by an Adreno 610 graphics processor.
During the Qualcomm keynote, the highlight for Snapdragon 655 was its ability to handle 48 Megapixel cameras, something that is becoming a marketing battle in the Premium space right now, with handsets such as the Honor View 20 (don’t miss our full Honor View 20 Camera Review).
We can’t wait to test 48-Megapixel handsets powered by Snapdragon 655. We’ll see how high they score in our Uber-G Camera IQ benchmark.
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