Qualcomm
On Thursday, Qualcomm announced its latest midrange mobile processor – the Snapdragon 780G, a 5nm component that will last last year 765. The Snapdragon 700 series is a midrange line that offers similar features to the series famous Snapdragon 800 but at slightly lower performance for much lower cost.
On the surface, it’s easy to take a look at last year’s Snapdragon 768G and this year’s 780G and see a similar result: an octa-core processor with an Adreno GPU. But while the main account remained stable, the types did not do right.
Earlier Snapdragon 700 series SoCs used one “fastest” Cortex A-76 core, another “almost as fast” Cortex A-76, and six “slow-and-low” Cortex A-55 cores that can back-up information at a minimum of battery drainage. The new 780G moves things around, with three high-speed cores and just four slow cores:
| SoC | Core as soon as | Fast Core (s) | Slow / efficient cores |
| Snapdragon 768G | 1x Cortex A-76 @ 2.8 GHz | 1x Cortex A-76 @ 2.4 GHz | Cortex 6x A-55 @ 1.8 GHz |
| Snapdragon 780G | 1x Cortex A-78 @ 2.4 GHz | 3x Cortex A-78 @ 2.2 GHz | 4x Cortex A-55 @ 1.9 GHz |
This strikes us as a very large move, and clarifies the amount of wiggle space in a word like “octa-core” in today’s large / small CPUs, where capabilities and performance levels are good. different at the different rights.
The 780G also gets an updated GPU – Qualcomm says its Adreno 642 gets a 50 percent performance boost over the Adreno 620 in the 768G. Anandtech’s napkin back-napkin math puts that pretty much on par with the late 2018 Adreno 640’s Snapdragon 855.
The Snapdragon 780G offers a new and improved Hexagon 770 AI processor, with a lower-powered AI accelerator that can handle tasks like filtering out wind and background noise during calls without eating too long into battery stores. There is also support for 5G modems and Wi-Fi 6E and an image signal processor that can process three 25 MP images simultaneously. This allows a phone with a triple lens configuration to capture images from wide-angle, ultra-wide-angle and telephoto cameras from a single click.
Qualcomm says the first devices with Snapdragon 780G hardware should start delivery in Q2 2021.