At MWC 2018, Qualcomm announced the new Snapdragon 700 series. However, it didn’t release any info on any specific chip in the series. Later, reports revealed that the first chipset in the series will be called the Snapdragon 710 processor. Full details of the mobile platform have surfaced along with that of another chipset called the Snapdragon 730.
Snapdragon 710
The Snapdragon 710 was already revealed to be a rebranded Snapdragon 670. So some of the specs are similar to that of the 670 that leaked earlier this year.
The SD710 will be built using Samsung’s 10nm LPE (Low Power Early) node. It will have support for 2×2 MU-MIMO, dual-band WiFi, and Bluetooth 5.0. The SDR660 transceiver found in the Snapdragon 630 and Snapdragon 660 SoCs is also present.
The CPU of the Snapdragon 710 consists of 2 x Kryo 3xx cores clocked at 2.2GHz and 6 x Kryo 3xx cores clocked at 1.7GHz. The GPU is an Adreno 615 that can be clocked as high as 750MHz. It also supports 60+fps UI for QHD displays and has HDR10 support.
The Snapdragon 710 has a Spectra 250 ISP with support for up to 32MP and 3 concurrent sensors. It will work with UFS 2.1 and eMMC storage types and USB 3.1 and USB 2.0 ports. It doesn’t have a dedicated NPU, so machine learning tasks will be handled by the GPU and Hexagon digital processor Vector eXtensions (HVX).
Snapdragon 730
The Snapdragon 730, on the other hand, will be built using Samsung’s 8nm LPP. Samsung announced last year that its 8nm LPP was ready for production. It uses 10% less power than 10LPP and has a 10% smaller surface area and it appears Qualcomm will be the first to get a taste of the new process.
Connectivity features are the same as that of the Snapdragon 710 except that it will have Bluetooth 5.1 instead of 5.0.
CPU configuration is where the key difference lies. The Snapdragon 730 has 2 x Kryo 4xx cores clocked at 2.3GHz and 6x Kryo 4xx cores clocked at 1.8GHz. It has the same Adreno 615 GPU. Its ISP is the Spectra 350 and it also has FS2 sensor support.
Both the Snapdragon 710 and Snapdragon 730 have the same video coding support as well as storage type and support for peripherals. However, where they differ again is in AI features. The SD730 has a dedicated NPU (NPU 120) for handling machine learning tasks.
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Both chipsets will likely be unveiled before the end of the year but we may not see them in devices until next year save for the 710. Xiaomi has been testing a device powered by the Snapdragon 710 and may be one of the first phones to come with it.
