Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 660 and 630

Qualcomm has announced their newest mid-range SoCs, the Snapdragon 660 and 630, which will be succeeding the Snapdragon 653 and the Snapdragon 626.

The Snapdragon 660 is built on 14nm technology and has a 8x Kryo 260 CPU cores clocked at 2.2GHz. The Kryo 260 CPU has up to 20% higher performance than the prior generation.

The GPU is an Adreno 512, which is said to be 30% faster than the Adreno 510 in the 653. The Snapdragon 660 supports Quick Charge 4, a technology that the company announced last year. The Quick Charge 4 gives you 5 hours of talk time in just 5 minutes of charging.

The Snapdragon 660 also has the latest Snapdragon X12 LTE modem paired with the new SDR660 RF transceiver, which supports peak downlink data rates of 600Mbps to the 600-tier lineup of SOCs for the first time. The Snapdragon 660 supports 2x2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi for twice as much data throughput and up to 60% lower download power consumption as the Snapdragon 652.

The Snapdragon 630 is also built on 14nm technology and has 8x ARM Cortex-A53 CPU clocked at 2.2GHz, which is said to be 10% faster than the Snapdragon 626.

The GPU in the Snapdragon 630 is the Adreno 508, which should be 30% faster than the Adreno 506 in the Snapdragon 626.

The Snapdragon 630 also has the latest Snapdragon X12 LTE modem, and it also supports Quick Charge 4.

Read also: Qualcomm introduces faster Quick Charge 4

Both platforms share the same modem and camera architecture. They also provide 4K video capture and playback capabilities, along with 8GB maximum memory and Vulkan API support. Additionally, the Snapdragon 660 Mobile Platform supports displays up to QHD resolution, whereas the 630 only supports FHD/QXGA (1080p).

Snapdragon 660 is now available to the company's partners, and devices with this SoC will start shipping by the end of this quarter. The Snapdragon 630 will be available by the end of May and devices will start shipping next quarter.