At its annual 5G Summit, Qualcomm announced its latest premium mid-range chipset, the Snapdragon 778G 5G. The chipset will power many of the upcoming premium phones from Xiaomi, OPPO, Honor, Realme, and other OEMs due to launch in the second half of the year.
Qualcomm has upgraded the Snapdragon 778G in every aspect over its predecessor, the Snapdragon 768G, to offer better performance and battery life. It also packs many features that have so far only been found in Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 8xx-series platform.
Faster and More Power Efficient
The Snapdragon 778G is based on the 6nm fabrication process. It features an octa-core CPU configuration, packing four Kryo 670 cores clocked at up to 2.4GHz. This is coupled with an Adreno 642L GPU.
In its announcement on its newsroom, Qualcomm says the new CPU and GPU configuration delivers a 40 percent uplift in performance over the Snapdragon 768G. This should help with app loading times and improved gaming performance.
The naming scheme implies the Snapdragon 778G sits below the Snapdragon 780G 5G chipset announced earlier this year.
The Snapdragon 778G also packs selected Snapdragon Elite Gaming features. This includes Variable Rate Shading, which allows developers to group and adjust pixel shading in a scene to reduce the GPU load. The Quick Touch gaming feature will help reduce touch latency by 20 percent.
For AI tasks, the Snapdragon 778G has the Hexagon 770 processor that delivers 12 TOPs performance. This new processor is 2x faster per watt than the Snapdragon 768G's AI processor. It is paired with the second-generation Sensing Hub that features a low-power AI processor to carry out contextual tasks.
For improved camera performance, the Snapdragon 778G packs a triple ISP configuration. This allows it to capture photos or videos simultaneously from three cameras at once. It also supports recording 4K videos in HDR10+ format. It is further assisted by the Staggered HDR image sensors that help capture videos with improved colors, contrast, and details.
On the connectivity front, the Snapdragon 778G features Qualcomm's Snapdragon X53 5G modem and FastConnect 6700, which features both mmWave and sub-6 5G connectivity. The chip also supports Wi-Fi 6, 6E, and Bluetooth 5.2.
Honor Gets on the Snapdragon Bandwagon
The first set of devices using the Snapdragon 778G chipset will be available starting from the second quarter of 2021. They will be available from the likes of Honor, Xiaomi, Realme, OPPO, and others.
Interestingly, Honor so far had used Huawei's Kirin chipsets for its devices. However, with Huawei selling Honor due to restrictions imposed on it by the US, the company is now free to use chipsets from Qualcomm for its future devices. This also means that future Honor devices could launch with Google apps and services out of the box.