The Snapdragon 835 was easily the most popular processor for flagship Android phones, beating the likes of Samsung, Huawei‘s HiSilicon and Mediatek.
Now, a Weibo post (spotted by GSMArena) has revealed details of three supposedly upcoming chips, including a processor that looks set to equal or even eclipse the Snapdragon 835 in the power stakes.
No ad to show here.
Snapdragon 670 to beat 2017’s flagship?
The Snapdragon 670 is the most powerful chip in the report, touting an octacore layout of four high-powered cores and four low-powered cores. This is a similar layout to the Snapdragon 835 at first glance.
However, it appears that Qualcomm has swapped out its semi-custom Kryo cores (based on ARM’s A73 and A53 tech) in favour of semi-custom Kryo cores based on ARM’s newest A75 and A55 cores, dubbing them Kryo Gold and Kryo Silver.
These seem to be lower-clocked versions of the Snapdragon 845’s Kryo Gold and Kryo Silver cores (2Ghz and 1.6Ghz versus 2.8Ghz and 1.8Ghz for the flagship chip).
At the Snapdragon 845 reveal, Qualcomm claimed that the 2018 processor’s cores see performance improvements of 25-30% (for heavyweight core) and 15% (for the light core) over the Snapdragon 835. With the clock speed decrease taken into account, the 670 is still looking like an improvement (or roughly equal footing at worst) on 2017’s flagship chip.
The Snapdragon 670 might deliver flagship performance in an ‘upper mid-range’ package, if confirmed
It doesn’t hurt that the Snapdragon 670 is apparently packing the same 10nm manufacturing process as the Snapdragon 835. Of course, a smaller manufacturing process generally means more efficient chips and better sustained performance.
Other claimed specs include support for dual 13MP cameras or a 26MP main camera and an Adreno 620 GPU. The latter is increasingly becoming a huge factor in smartphone performance as well.
Read more: Leak – here’s why Snapdragon 460 might be 2018’s superstar budget chip
All in all, we’ll need to see benchmark scores and corroborated details to determine whether the 670 is indeed a rough match for the Snapdragon 835. But one thing is for certain: it blows 2016’s Snapdragon 820 and 821 out of the water on paper.
So if you’re going to buy an upper mid-range smartphone in 2018, you’ll want to keep an eye out on this chipset — you’ll definitely be getting flagship levels of performance.
