Qualcomm's Snapdragon 780G brings flagship features to mid-range phones

Dimapur, March 25 (EMN): Qualcomm has announced today the successor to its hugely popular Snapdragon 765/765G SoCs, the Snapdragon 780G.

According to a blog post on Qualcomm's website, "This platform enables a selection of premium-tier features for the first time in the 7-series, making next-generation experiences more broadly accessible."

Introduced in 2018 to bridge the gap between the Snapdragon 6 and 8 series, the 7-series lineup brought some premium features found only in the company's top-tier 8-series chips to the affordable mid-range segment. Last year, the company's Snapdragon 765G platform saw huge success with the likes of the OnePlus Nord, OPPO Reno 5, Mi 10 Lite, Vivo V20 Pro, and Nokia 8.3, to name but a few, all rocking the chipset.

Qualcomm has taken a step further with the introduction of its new Snapdragon 780G processor as it is built on the 5nm architecture, a first in the company's 7-series lineup. Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 780G uses much more powerful Kryo 670 CPU cores clocked at up to 2.4GHz frequency delivering a "40% performance uplift" when compared to the previous generation.

In terms of gaming performance, the Snapdragon 780G comes with the new Adreno 642 GPU. This will finally enable affordable gaming phones to handle displays with up to 144Hz refresh rate.

In the blog post, Qualcomm wrote, "Snapdragon 780G comes fully optimized with a suite of select Qualcomm® Snapdragon Elite Gaming™ features. With dozens of mobile-first features, the platform delivers desktop-level capabilities including updateable GPU drivers, ultra-smooth gaming, and True 10-bit HDR gaming. Snapdragon Elite Gaming is designed to help bring all the top AAA games to the hands of mobile gamers around the world, and with select features available on Snapdragon 780G, it will help enable next-generation gaming to be more broadly accessible to OEMs and consumers."

The company claims that the new Snapdragon 780G platform will perform better at taking low-light images thanks to its Spectra 570 image signal processor (ISP). The Spectra 570 reportedly has the capability to process three 25MP images simultaneously. It also has support for features like 4K HDR, HDR10+, and HLG video capture.

The Snapdragon 780G platform also boasts Qualcomm’s top-tier FastConnect 6900 system — a feature that was only available on chips like the Snapdragon 888 and 865+. The 780G platform will have support for 5G, WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

The Snapdragon 780G will have excellent AI performance due to its new Hexagon 770 processor capable of delivering up to 12 TOPS (trillions of operations). This is twice the speed of its previous generation and very close to the speed offered by the company's top-tier 8-series lineup.

According to Qualcomm, devices featuring the new Snapdragon 780G chipset are expected to hit the shelves in the second quarter of 2021.