Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 Aims at Mobile Gaming Prowess

Qualcomm announced a new Snapdragon 675 platform this week (press release) and noted that the new platform is aimed directly at “outstanding gaming” and advanced AI along with “cutting-edge” camera performance. The SoC will land for consumer devices in early 2019. On the gaming side of things, Qualcomm says the 675 will deliver high frame rates and smooth gaming experiences while supporting lots of game engines.

Supported game engines include Unity, Unreal, Messiah, and NeoX, supported tools and APIs for gaming include Vulkan, OpenGL 3.2, OpenCL, and Snapdragon profiler. The image capturing side of the SoC promises to allow users to capture images and videos with professional quality in the day or night and with slow-motion capability. Snapdragon 675 supports a triple camera configuration on the front and back with support for wide angle, telephoto, and super-wide image capture.

Bokeh effect is supported along with 3D face unlock and “epic” selfie mode. Qualcomm integrates a multi-core AI Engine that delivers up to a 50% overall improvement in AI applications. Qualcomm states, “Through heterogenous computing, the Hexagon DSP, Adreno GPU, and Kryo CPU are engineered to work cooperatively to run AI applications on-device faster and more efficiently.”

Snapdragon 675 also promises to improve DSP security for face unlocking. The Snapdragon X12 modem supports downloads up to 600Mbps with 3x carrier aggregation. Quick Charge 4+ is supported to allow batteries to charge from 0% to 50% in 15 minutes.