Back in 2018, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 675 SoC. It powered popular devices like the Redmi Note 7 Pro, Vivo U20, Samsung Galaxy A70s. Today, the company has announced a successor, the Snapdragon 678 SoC. It focuses on improving photography, connectivity whilst not giving up on battery life.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 678 is an Octa-Core CPU built on the 11nm LLP process. As per the official press release, the SoC brings a minute performance upgrade over the predecessor. Accordingly, it has a Kryo 460 CPU clocked at 2.2GHz compared to 2.0GHz on the Snapdragon 675. However, the GPU on the 678 is the same Adreno 612 but Qualcomm says it has increased the performance.
For the unware, Kryo is a series of semi-custom ARM cores that Qualcomm uses on its Snapdragon SoCs. Here, the Kryo 460 refers to Cortex A76 and Cortex A55 cores. Out of this, 2xA76 high-performance cores are clocked up to 2.2GHz as mentioned by Qualcomm.
Snapdragon 678 Specifications
For specs, the SoC supports display up to FHD+ with a max resolution of 2520×1080 pixels and 10-bit color depth. For cameras, it has a 14-bit Qualcomm Spectra™ 250L ISP. This supports a single camera up to 192MP and a single/double camera with MFNR up to 25/16MP respectively. Here, MFNR refers to Multiple Frame Noise reduction.
Qualcomm says the 3rd gen Qualcomm® AI engine supports camera features like portrait mode, low-light, laser auto-focus, 4K video at 30fps, 5x Optical zoom, slow-mo(up to 1080p at 120fps), and more. It also supports HEVC(High-Efficiency Video Coding) and has Accelerated EIS support.
As mentioned above, the Adreno 612 GPU is the same as the predecessor. However, Qualcomm says this SoC is optimized for Unity, Messiah, NeoX, and Unreal Engine 4, among other top games, and more.
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Connectivity and other features
Similarly, the SD678 has the same X12 LTE modem. As the name suggests it doesn’t support 5G. However, it supports peak download, upload speeds of 600,150 Mbps respectively. There is Dual-SIM VoLTE and 3x20MHz downlink carrier aggregation support as well.
As for connectivity, we have Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS, GPS, QZSS, SBAS for navigation. For ports, you get USB-C with USB-3.1 support.
Other features include 8GB DDR4 RAM at 1866MHz, video playback up to 4K with HEVC, AVC codec support, Qualcomm® aptX™, aptX™ HD audio, audio playback up to 4W, Quick Charge™ 4+ technology, and more.
