Your next phone could be powered by Snapdragon 660, 630

Qualcomm has officially revealed its latest round of chips, targeting budget and “upper-mid range” handsets. The Snapdragon 660 will target phone manufacturers who want performance approaching flagship levels, while the Snapdragon 630 hopes to continue the frugal, mid-range reputation established by the Snapdragon 625.

We saw the 660’s predecessor, the Snapdragon 650/652, being used in the likes of the LG G5 SE, the Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3. Meanwhile, the Snapdragon 625 was used in the likes of the Moto Z Play, Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 and Huawei Nova.

So what’s different with these latest bits of silicon?

For starters, a version of the in-house Spectra image signal processor (ISP), traditionally seen on the Snapdragon 820 and 835, has made its way to the 630 and 660. Qualcomm says that the ISP supports more accurate skin tones, better low light performance, higher throughput for dual cameras, better power efficiency, bokeh effects, smoother optical zoom, dual pixel autofocus and better video stabilisation.

The new chips also support better machine learning and computer vision capabilities.

The Snapdragon 630 and Snapdragon 660 are expected to power budget and pseudo-flagship phones later this year

Other standard features across the two include being manufactured on a 14nm process, support for 16MP dual camera layouts (or 24MP single camera), support for up to 8GB of RAM, 4K/30fps video recording, 1080p/120fps video recording and Quick Charge 4.0 tech. For the latter, Qualcomm claims up to 50% battery capacity in 15 minutes.

Otherwise, you’re looking at an octacore A53 CPU (up to 2.2Ghz) and an Adreno 508 GPU for the Snapdragon 630, being similar to the Snapdragon 625 it’s meant to replace. Meanwhile, the Snapdragon 660 ditches ARM’s standard cores in favour of Qualcomm’s own Kryo 260 CPU cores (as opposed to the Snapdragon 835’s Kryo 280). The 660 also packs an Adreno 512 GPU for graphical grunt.

One key difference however, is the fact that the Snapdragon 660 supports 2560×1440 displays, while the Snapdragon 630 tops out at 1920×1080.

Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 660 “is now shipping”, so expect device announcements in the coming weeks. The Snapdragon 630 begins shipping “towards the end of this month”.

Featured image: Qualcomm screengrab