U.S fabless chipmaker Qualcomm first announced its new Snapdragon 700 series at MWC 2018 with the Snapdragon 710 being the first of the series to find its way into smartphones. The new SDM700 series lies in between the flagship Snapdragon 800 series and the premium mid-range Snapdragon 600 series. It draws a number of advanced features from the former and is very suitable for high-end models.
Apart from the Snapdragon 710, little is known of other members of the series but a new rumour has emerged which deals with the Snapdragon 720. While there is presently no information on the specification of the Snapdragon 720, it is only known to be an enhanced version of the Snapdragon 710. However, the SDM720 is said to have a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) similar to Huawei’s Kirin 970 which is dedicated to AI acceleration. If this turns out to be true, it will be the first time Qualcomm as the current Snapdragon platform doesn’t have a dedicated AI hardware unit but rather relies on the Artificial Intelligence Engine(AIE). This is software-based and the efficiency in the specific AI scene is still low.
In addition to Snapdragon 720, there had been a leaked poster that appeared a few months back containing details of the Snapdragon 730. The earlier leak tipped that Qualcomm’s SDM730 will be manufactured using a Samsung 8nm LPP process (10nm upgrade), integrating two Kryo 4xx 2.3GHz, six Kryo 4xx 1.8 GHz CPU core and specially equipped with NPU 120 unit!
Related: Mysterious Snapdragon 680 Appears on Geekbench with Impressive Scores
Finally, the new rumour also includes that at least three mobile phone manufacturers are currently developing Snapdragon 720-powered models, of which Samsung is expected to be the first to utilise the chipset on its mid-range Galaxy series.
(source)
