Key Highlights:
Weeks before Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona, Qualcomm announced a new addition to its lineup of smartphone chipsets — The Snapdragon 712. The chip is a follow-up to the Snapdragon 710, which the company launched as a bridge between its mid-range and high-end chipsets. The Snapdragon 712 encompasses almost all of the features of its predecessor and adds a few more like support for Quick Charge 4+ and a new DSP.
The Snapdragon 712 is based on a 10nm manufacturing process and comes with the company’s AI Engine that combines the CPU, GPU and the DSP to process AI tasks. The Snapdragon 712 is powered by the same Kryo 360 cores clocked at 2.3GHz, a hair higher than the Snapdragon 710. The SoC have support for up to 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM at 1866Mhz.
Even the GPU on the new SoC is the same as the Snapdragon 710. It uses the Adreno 616 GPU. However, Qualcomm claims the SoC delivers 35 percent improvement in graphics performance and power efficiency, as compared to the Snapdragon 710. The same Spectra 250 ISP is there as well with a promise of 40 percent improvement in power efficiency.
The major difference in specs of the Snapdragon 712 is the support for Quick Charge 4+ that can reportedly charge 50 percent of a smartphone in 15 minutes. There is also a new Hexagon 685 DSP.
The inbuilt modem remains the Snapdragon X15 that supports LTE Cat.15 downlink and Cat.13 uplink promising peak speeds of 800 Mbps and 150 Mbps respectively.
The SoC also has support a 20MP dual camera or a 32MP single shooter with the same Spectra 250 ISP found in the Snapdragon 710.
It’s not clear when the chipset will find it’s way in smartphones, but considering that it takes around two months for a Qualcomm chip to be used in a smartphone, it is likely to be used in devices announced after MWC 2019.
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Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 mobile platform with Kryo 360 cores unveiled