Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 678 for midrange smartphones

Qualcomm has announced a new soc for midrange smartphones. It concerns the Snapdragon 678, a slight upgrade compared to the two-year-old Snapdragon 675. The new Snapdragon is mainly slightly faster than its predecessor.

The Snapdragon 678 offers two performance improvements over the Snapdragon 675, according to Qualcomm. The soc still contains the Kryo 460 CPU, but the clock speed of the two fast Cortex A76 cores has been increased from 2.0 to 2.2 GHz.

Furthermore, the same Adreno 612 GPU in the Snapdragon 678 would perform better, but the chip designer does not clarify to what extent or in which area that is the case. Like the Snapdragon 675, the new 678 is made at 11nm and 5G support is still lacking.

With the Snapdragon 678, Qualcomm is targeting mid-range smartphones. It remains to be seen which new smartphones will use the new soc. The predecessor, the Snapdragon 675, is included in the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro, Moto Z4 and Samsung Galaxy M40.