Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 675 Set To Accelerate Gaming, AI & Camera For Mainstream Devices

It’s fun to talk about the latest high-end hardware all of the time, but the (obvious) fact of the matter is, the majority of users are not going to be using that high-end hardware. Instead, most people are going to opt for a middle-of-the-road option, one that doesn’t break the bank, but still offers enough performance and features to help negate it from feeling like anything but high-end hardware.

With Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 675, the situation for those “middle-of-the-road” users is going to get a lot better, as this new SoC really packs in the features and performance. At the forefront, 675 aims to be a great solution for the camera, AI, and of course, gaming.

Directly compared to the Snapdragon 670 to come before it, Qualcomm says that the 675 is going to be 30% faster in launching games, 35% faster for web browsing, 20% faster for music launch, and 15% faster for social media launch. On the camera front, the new 675 supports a triple camera setup with 5x optical zoom, as well as support for HDR+Bokeh to create some stunning portraits.

The 675 even manages to match the 845 in that it can record 720p video at up to 480 FPS, for some quality super slo-mo action. It also supports 4K video capture, but it’s not explicitly stated if that’s going to include 60 FPS like the 845. I’d wager no, since the 835 didn’t have it.

For artificial intelligence, the Snapdragon 675 combines three processors together to get the job done: the Kyro CPU, Adreno GPU, and Hexagon DSP. A super-popular use of AI in the past year or so has been “style transfer”, where you take a preexisting art style, allowing you to take a photo inspired by that photo. An example of the Hong Kong skyline helps illustrate this below:

This level of AI also makes it a breeze to use the Face Unlock feature commonly seen on higher-end devices. The verdict is still out on just how secure this kind of technology is, so you should still use it at your own risk (it has been broken through before, but it’s obviously getting better all of the time). You can expect the same kind of quality iteration for voice analysis.

For gaming, this chip isn’t meant for only “light” gaming, but competitive-level gaming. I’ll be blunt in saying that the vast majority of mobile games won’t take full advantage of a high-end chip like the Snapdragon 845, so the 675 stands to become an incredibly good value for what it offers. It’s not going to be found in cutting-edge phones sporting more than 60Hz screens, after all – those will surely remain exclusive to the 800 series.

I understand that Qualcomm was in Hong Kong when it made the Snapdragon 675 announcement, but a ton of games I’ve never heard of were talked about at last December’s 845 announcement just the same. Are you personally looking forward to playing Dou Po Cang Qiong or QQ Car Racing? I’m going to jump to conclusions and say “no”. At least there is a single game we’ve heard of on the list: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and that one happens to be ridiculously popular.

Could the Snapdragon 675 be the final mainstream mobile SoC to preface the 5G generation? It seems like it could be, but it also seems likely that it will take some time before 5G is so commonplace that we don’t even need to think about it anymore. Fortunately, things seem to be off to a good start, with Qualcomm reiterating that a major 5G roll out will occur in 2019. That cannot come quick enough, especially as we’ve been hearing about the new technologies for so long!

As for the 675 itself, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a number of products bundling it in shown-off at January’s CES. It’s almost scary to think that is just over two months away!