Snapdragon 675, the mid-range chip that is widely used in budget phones was first announced back in 2018. It is about to get a successor chip soon now that Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 678, which brings slight improvements in terms of connectivity as well as photography.
The new SD678 is based on the same 11nm LLP process as the SD675 and is quite similar to its predecessor overall. You get the same Cortex A76 CPU cores as well, but now they are working at 2.2GHz instead of 2.0GHz. There is the same Adreno 612 GPU as well, but Qualcomm says that it has been tweaked for better performance.
Other specifications are identical as well. The SoC can support up to 2520×1080 pixel resolution displays with 10-bit color and 48MP main cameras and 16MP selfie cameras. Video recording capabilities go up to 4K 30FPS on the HEVC codec. Other than that, it has Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X12 LTE Modem, Hexagon 685 DSP, and the Spectra 250L ISP.
We can expect the first few Snapdragon 678 phones to surface in early 2021. These will likely be entry-level or mid-range phones with affordable price tags especially since there is no 5G support on the chip.
