Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 announced

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 630 and the Snapdragon 660 mobile platforms, which promise improved performance, enhanced photography, better connectivity, and longer battery life. According to the company, the new chipsets are created to bring "more affordable high quality features for more smartphones and tablets, with little compromise on power". The Snapdragon 630 is an improved version of the Snapdragon 626 and should offer users significant improvements in several key areas.

The Snapdragon 630 features the Adreno 508 GPU which promises a 30% increase in graphics performance and 10% improvement in CPU performance when compared to the Snapdragon 625 processor. The chip supports up to 8GB of maximum memory.

Additionally the Snapdragon 630 provides Vulkan API support as well as integrated 4K video capture and playback capabilities. This allows the user to record high-definition videos at 30 frames per second, directly from the device.

Photography

The Snapdragon 630 supports Qualcomm's Spectra 160 camera image signal processor (ISP). This chip should improve our photographic experience by producing more natural skin tones with focus on low light photography and improved power efficiency.

The new ISP comes also with improved support for dual cameras as well as features such as smooth optical zoom, bokeh effects, dual pixel autofocus, and improved video stabilization.

Connectivity

The Snapdragon 630 features a Snapdragon X12 modem that is claimed to offer up to 600Mbps of downlink data rates. The chip also support Bluetooth 5.0, which has four times the range and twice the transmission speed of the previous Bluetooth 4.2 technology.

Power Efficiency

The Snapdragon 630 features Qualcomm Quick Charge 4 technology, which claims to offer 5 hours of talk time with just 5 minutes of charging and up to 50 percent battery life with only 15 minutes of charging.

Machine Learning

With the Snapdragon 630 Qualcomm allows developers and OEMs to use machine learning to power user experiences by using Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK and offers support for the open source TensorFlow, Caffe, and Caffe2 machine learning software frameworks. All of these software tools will be supported by the CPU, GPU, and Qualcomm’s Hexagon digital signal processor (DSP), as well as its HVX vector extensions.

Availability

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 will be available towards the end of this month. At this point, we dont know which devices will be employing this chip.