Qualcomm
On Thursday, Qualcomm introduced its latest midrange mobile processor—the Snapdragon 780G, a 5nm half that succeeds final 12 months’s 765. The Snapdragon 700 sequence is a midrange line that provides related options to the flagship Snapdragon 800 sequence however at considerably decrease efficiency for considerably decrease price.
On the floor, it is easy to have a look at final 12 months’s Snapdragon 768G and this 12 months’s 780G and see an analogous product: an octa-core processor with Adreno GPU. But though the core rely remained fixed, the sorts of cores didn’t.
Earlier Snapdragon 700 sequence SoCs used one “quickest” Cortex A-76 core, one other “virtually as quick” Cortex A-76, and 6 “slow-and-low” Cortex A-55 cores that may get background duties performed with a minimal of battery drain. The new 780G shifts issues round, with three quick secondary cores and solely 4 sluggish cores:
| SoC | Fastest Core | Fast Core(s) | Slow/Efficient Cores |
| Snapdragon 768G | 1x Cortex A-76 @ 2.eight GHz | 1x Cortex A-76 @ 2.four GHz | 6x Cortex A-55 @ 1.eight GHz |
| Snapdragon 780G | 1x Cortex A-78 @ 2.four GHz | 3x Cortex A-78 @ 2.2 GHz | 4x Cortex A-55 @ 1.9 GHz |
This strikes us as a fairly large shift, and it highlights how a lot wiggle room there’s in a phrase like “octa-core” in fashionable large/little CPUs, the place the completely different cores have very completely different capabilities and efficiency ranges.
The 780G additionally will get an upgraded GPU—Qualcomm says its Adreno 642 will get a 50 % efficiency increase over the Adreno 620 in the 768G. Anandtech’s back-of-the-napkin math places that roughly on par with the Adreno 640 in late 2018’s Snapdragon 855 flagship.
Snapdragon 780G affords a new and improved Hexagon 770 AI processor, with a further lower-powered AI accelerator that may deal with duties like filtering out wind and background noise throughout calls with out consuming too far into battery reserves. There’s additionally assist for 5G and Wi-Fi 6E modems and a picture sign processor that may course of three 25 MP pictures concurrently. That permits for a telephone with a triple lens association to seize pictures from large, ultra-wide, and telephoto cameras from a single click on.
Qualcomm says the first Snapdragon 780G-equipped gadgets ought to start transport in Q2 2021.
