Today, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 778G Mobile Platform, a 6nm-based 5G chipset for high-end smartphones. It"s a direct successor to the Snapdragon 768G from last year, and it comes with some significant performance improvements and features trickled down from its premium products.
First off, there are major performance improvements in both the CPU and GPU. It has a Kryo 670 CPU with four high-performance cores and four power-efficient cores, promising a 40% increase in performance over the previous generation. It also has a new Adreno 642L GPU, which also touts 40% faster graphics rendering.
If you"re into gaming, the Adreno 642L also adds some new Snapdragon Elite Gaming features, like variable rate shading (VRS). This lets developers adjust the shading for different areas of an image to reduce the processing overhead without affecting the visual quality. There"s also the new Game Quick Touch feature, which can boost the touch response time of the display in games for reduced latency.
For the camera, Qualcomm has added the Spectra 570L ISP, a triple ISP similar to what"s found on the Snapdragon 888. This adds support for things like staggered HDR, and it also means the phone can record videos or take photos at up to 22MP from three cameras at once. You can also shoot 4K HDR10+ video with over one billion shades of color.
Of course, there are also AI improvements, with a sixth-generation Qualcomm AI Engine and the Hexagon 770 processor offering 12TOPS of performance for AI, twice as much performance per watt. It also has Qualcomm"s second-generation Sensing Hub which offers reduced power consumption for sensing your surroundings, which enables things like contextual volume adjustment based on the noise around you.
Finally, the Snapdragon 778G comes with the Snapdragon X53 5G modem and the FastConnect 6700 Connectivity System, supporting Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, as well as Bluetooth 5.2.
Devices with the Snapdragon 778G will be available in the second quarter of this year, which we"re already halfway through. We"ll be seeing devices from OPPO, Realme, Xiaomi, iQOO, and most notably, Honor. This is big news because, until now, Honor had to use Huawei"s Kirin chipsets due to a ban imposed by the United States. If the company is now buying silicon from Qualcomm, there"s a good chance that its next devices will also come with an Android license and Google services.