New Snapdragon 700 chipsets to make midrange phones AI-rich

Qualcomm’s mobile chipsets are known to be the best in business. Their diverse range of Snapdragon chipsets caters to smartphones across various price points. You have the Snapdragon 400 series for budget smartphones, the Snapdragon 600 series for midrange smartphones and the 800 series for flagship smartphones. However, the midrange smartphone segment is pretty diverse and the Snapdragon 600 series isn’t adequate for some premium midrange smartphones. Therefore, Qualcomm has filled the gap with its new Snapdragon 700 series that promises to bring exclusive premium features from 800 series to the affordable offerings.

The Snapdragon 700 will primarily borrow the Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence Engine and the Spectra ISP from the flagship 845 SoC, and mix it with slightly upgraded internals from the 600 series to offer better value for premium midrange smartphones. The 700 series is meant for those who care about artificial intelligence and notable smartphone photography — perfect for most manufacturers who care to build specific function-focused devices. Qualcomm says that the 700 chipsets will get a new version of Kryo CPUs that will focus on enhanced performance when compared to the Snapdragon 660. However, the users could expect up to 30 per cent improvement in battery life when compared to last year’s Snapdragon 660 chipset. The 700 series chipsets will also feature Quick Charge 4+ technology for topping up batteries from 0-50 per cent in 15 minutes. The 700 series chipsets will also feature faster connectivity components such as Bluetooth 5 and faster LTE chips.

Currently, the 700 series contains no specific chipset commercially available for use. However, Qualcomm says that they will be able to make it reach customers by the second half of 2018. There are no OEM partners mentioned for the 700 series yet, but expect renowned names such as ASUS, Xiaomi, Motorola and Sony to come with suitable devices in the coming months.

Qualcomm has also announced new Snapdragon 5G solution modules for commercial use. It will provide modules with integration of components to cover digital, RF, connectivity and front-end functionality. Key components include application processor, baseband modem, memory, power management integrated circuit (PMIC), RF Front-End (RFFE), antennas and passive components, providing optimized solutions engineered to make it easy for OEMs to be quickly up and running with lower cost and time investment. Qualcomm says that end users will benefit with lower device costs with their new platform.

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