Qualcomm has announced a new mid-range chipset, the Snapdragon 710 SoC. This will be the first chipset in its recently announced Snapdragon 700 series for the mobile platform. As budget smartphones become more popular, we expect premium features to trickle down to mid-range and budget devices as well. The new Snapdragon 710 chipset has a lot of optimisations which should help make premium smartphone features more accessible to mid-rangers.
The Snapdragon 710 sits somewhere between the Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 845. It is not as powerful or efficient as the Snapdragon 845 but, has enough improvements to be superior to the Snapdragon 660. Qualcomm concedes that Snapdragon 710 has improvements in most of the popular consumer use cases. For example, 4K HDR video recording will consume 40% less power compared to 4K SDR capture on the 660.
The Snapdragon 710’s processors also have a different composition. Qualcomm has designed the octa-core chip with two 2.2GHz ARM Cortex-A75 cores for performance and six 1.7GHz ARM Cortex-A55 cores for efficiency. According to Snapdragon, users can expect 25% faster web browsing, 20% overall increase in performance, and 15% faster app loading compared to the Snapdragon 660. The battery life will also improve, thanks to the composition of the cores of the SoC.
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The new chipset is also the first for Snapdragon to feature 600-series GPU. According to Qualcomm, the 616 GPU will allow for up to 35% faster graphics rendering while consuming up to 40% less power. This is a great news for people who like gaming on budget smartphones.
Specifications
| Specifications | Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 | Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 |
| CPU | Kyro 260 4x 2.2GHz (Cortex-A73) 4x 1.8GHz (Cortex-A53) |
Kyro 360 2x 2.2GHz (Cortex-A75) 6x 1.7GHz (Cortex-A55) |
| GPU | Adreno 512 | Adreno 616 |
| DSP | Hexagon 680 | 3.0 |
| ISP | Spectra 160 ISP 24MP |
Spectra 250 ISP 32MP single / 20MP dual |
| Memory | 2x 32-bit @ 1866MHz LPDDR4 29.9GB/s |
2x 32-bit @ 1866MHz LPDDR4 29.9GB/s 1MB system cache |
| Integrated Modem | Snapdragon X12 LTE (Category 12/13) DL = 600Mbps 3x20MHz CA, 256-QAM UL = 150Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM |
Snapdragon X15 LTE (Category 15/7) DL = 800Mbps 4x20MHz CA, 256-QAM UL = 300Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 256-QAM |
| Encode/ Decode |
2160p30, 1080p120 H.264 & H.265 |
2160p30, 1080p120 H.264 & H.265 10-bit HDR pipelines |
| Manufacturing Process | 14 nm | 10 nm |
