Qualcomm Snapdragon 660, Snapdragon 630: Everything you need to know

Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and 630 use a 14nm FinFET process. They provide 4K video capture and playback capabilities, along with 8GB maximum memory and Vulkan API support.

“With the introduction of the Snapdragon 660 and 630 Mobile Platforms, we are thrilled that features such as improved image quality and fast LTE speeds will now be available in a wide array of devices without sacrificing performance or quality,” said Kedar Kondap, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and 630 support company’s Spectra 160 camera ISP that helps improve photography by producing more natural skin tones. With a focus on low light photography, the SoCs improve on power efficiency and higher output for dual camera smartphones.

Other features which are supported by by the new range of processors include smoother optical zoom, bokeh effects, dual pixel autofocus as well as an improved video stabilization.

In terms of audio and visual processing, Qualcomm Snapdragon 660’s with Hexagon 680 DSP featuring vector extensions (HVX) enables machine intelligence workloads in company’s 600 tier of SoCs. It comes with support for TensorFlow and Halide libraries that integrate Qualcomm’s All-Ways Aware technology as well.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and 630 feature a Snapdragon X12 modem that is claimed to offer up to 600Mbps of downlink data rates. The Snapdragon 660 comes with support for 2×2 MU-MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which the company says offers twice as much data throughput and up to 60 percent lower download power consumption, when compared to Snapdragon 652.

To take care of power efficiency and thermal performance, the company has integrated high-power user equipment (HPUE) in Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 and 630.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 comes with Kryo 260 CPU and Adreno 512 GPU, which offer 20 per cent and 30 per cent improvement in performance. Snapdragon 630, on the other hand, a 30 percent increase in Adreno 508 GPU performance and a 10 per cent increase in CPU performance.

With Snapdragon 660 and and Snapdragon 630, the Qualcomm Quick Charge 4 is now coming to company’s 600 series of SoCs. It is claimed to offer up to 5 hours of talk time in just 5 minutes of charging and up to 50 percent battery life in just 15 minutes of charging.

Qualcomm is allowing developers and OEMs to use machine learning to power immersive user experiences using Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK and offers support for TensorFlow. Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 is now shipping, while the Snapdragon 630 will begin shipping towards the end of this month.

Disclaimer: The reporter is in Singapore at the invite of Qualcomm India