Published in Mobiles

Snapdragon 670 is 10 nm mainstream

by on14 February 2018


2+6 cores mainstream

Qualcomm is gaining traction with its 600 series chipsets and it is about to announce a new one. The Snapdragon 670 comes with dual high-end CPUs and six energy efficient ones, all in 10nm.

The new SoC is replacing the year old Snapdragon 660 that showed up in a lot of Chinese /Taiwanese based manufacturers phones and will shrink the transistor size from 14nm to 10nm.

The new Snapdragon 670 is taking a new approach using  two Cortex A75 based cores called Kryo 300 Gold and six Cortex A55 based Kryo 300 silver codes. Bear in mind that the Cortex A55 will boost performance significantly, compared to the Cortex A53 and it will free up a lot of battery in the process.

The CPU cores have 32KB L1 cache or 128 KB L2 per cluster and 1024 KB of L3 for the whole SoC.

The two Cortex A75 based cores called Kryo 300 Gold will work up to 2.6GHz while the Cortex A55 based Kryo 300 silver cores will jump to 1.7GHz. This setup will fight with anything that MediaTek throws at them in 2018 and Chinese manufacturers are moving towards Qualcomm in the mainstream/performance and especially the high end market. 

The Snapdragon 670’s GPU may be using the Qualcomm Adreno 615, with a clock speed of 430MHz – 650MHz and the ability to dynamically jump to 700MHz. The new SoC supports 13MP + 23MP camera sensors and the WQHD 2560×1440 resolution. It is not clear if the platform supports the latest and greatest X20 Snapdragon modem,  that Qualcomm announced for the Snapdragon 845 flagship. Since the Snapdragon 670 is likely to be a 10nm part, we can probably expect the X20 with 1.2Gbps

We would also expect to see support for 802.11 ac and it will be interesting to see if Qualcomm is betting on the 802.11 ad in the mainstream too. The Snapdragon 845 has  strong support for 802.11ad, and, guess what, the technology uses 60 GHz millimeter waves. Remember, millimeter waves will be a very important technology to get you to multi-gigabit speeds inside and outside of your home.

The source suggests the Mobile World Congress 2018 launch in late February is likely but our guess is that this might be too early. The chipset will likely be synced with the announcement of some big brands out of China. Oppo, Vivo or Xiaomi will use the Snapdragon 670 quite soon.  

It is hard to shake off the feeling that the Snapdragon 600 series has grown exponentially in both performance and acceptance. You need to settle with only a few trade offs going to this market segment and two Cortex A75 based performance cores and six A55 based efficiency cores should be enough for most users.

Last modified on 14 February 2018
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Read more about: