Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G 5G Mobile Platform To Supercharge Premium Midrange Phones

Premium midrange Android phones are getting a serious shot in the arm performance-wise today, as San Diego 5G powerhouse Qualcomm has taken the wraps off its new Snapdragon 778G 5G Mobile Platform system-on-chip (SoC) solution. The company is promising major gains in mobile experiences in all areas that matter, from AI-assisted technologies, to general processing, gaming and graphics, 5G and WiFi connectivity, and computational photography.

Snapdragon 778G 5G is the company’s successor to its popular Snapdragon 765G Mobile Platform, and QCOM is announcing broad industry adoption for the new chipset with Motorola, Xiaomi, OPPO, Honor, Realme and iQOO announced support at launch.

Under The Hood Of Snapdragon 778G 5G At 6nm

Based on bleeding-edge 6nm (nanometer) fab process technology with TSMC, Snapdragon 778G 5G brings a significant performance lift across all of its major functional blocks, starting with its Kyro 670 engine, which is an octal-core CPU complex with a single Arm Cortex-A78-based Prime performance core, 3 Arm Cortex-A78 Gold cores and 4 Cortex-A55 efficiency cores.

The Kyro 670 is claimed to offer a 40% uplift versus QCOM’s previous-gen Snapdragon 765G Kyro engine, while its new Adreno 642L graphics engine is claimed to also deliver another 40% lift over the Snapdragon 765G’s Adreno 620 GPU. The Adreno 642L GPU also supports some of the latest in gaming and graphics technologies, like variable rate shading for more efficient rendering and Qualcomm Game Quick Touch for low latency touch input and response times for fast-twitch game titles.

In terms of AI processing for anything from recommender engines like Google Assistant to advancements in computation photography, Snapdragon 778G 5G brings a claimed 2X performance-per-watt lift with 12 TOPS of throughput versus 765G’s 5.5 TOPS spec, though raw AI processing power is only part of the equation. Snapdragon 778G 5G also incorporates triple-ISP (Image Signal Processor) array for major advancements in computational photography, similar to what the company delivered with its high-end Snapdragon 888 Mobile Platform that launched earlier this year. Phones built on the platform will be able to offer innovative features, like multiple simultaneous camera view video recording and computational HDR capture that combines three frames to optimize brightness, color and contrast with impressive results. I’ve personally been working with the Snapdragon 888-powered OnePlus 9 Pro, and if Snapdragon 778G 5G-powered devices can deliver what I’m experiencing with this device, shutterbugs in the upper-midrange Android phone market are in for a real treat.

Extending 5G And WiFi-6 Connectivity

Of course, on the connectivity side of things, Qualcomm continues its relentless push of the 5G rollout, with the Snapdragon 778G’s inclusion of an integrated Snapdragon X53 5G Modem that provides both Sub-6 and mmWave multi-gigabit connectivity, though handset OEMs will have discretion of whether or not they enable ultra-high speed mmWave or just stick with longer reach Sub-6 5G. Also on board is Qualcomm’s FastConnect 6700 Connectivity System that supports WiFi-6/6E 802.11ax networks at speeds up to 2.9Gbps, as well as Bluetooth 5.2.

“The Snapdragon 7-series is a critical component of Motorola phones, helping us bring premium experiences to a broader price range,” added Ruben Castano, VP of Customer Experience at Motorola. “The Snapdragon 778 5G’s accelerated AI and next-gen technology will power the Ready For platform on Snapdragon 7-series-based Motorola phones for the first time and lightning-fast 5G connectivity, which continues our goal to expand 5G devices across price points.”

Qualcomm notes that devices based on Snapdragon 778G will be available at retail sometime in the second quarter of 2021. I’d actually expect even broader adoption of this new Snapdragon upper-midrange solution, as major brands like OnePlus and others have also employed similar Qualcomm platforms in the past.