Qualcomm's new chip aims for AI, speed, photography

Qualcomm Technologies introduced the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 Mobile Platform this week. The Snapdragon 675 is said to offer an outstanding gaming experience and performance, a big leap in artificial intelligence (AI) capability and a cutting-edge camera. Premium features in the Snapdragon 675 are enabled by the Qualcomm AI Engine, Qualcomm Spectra ISP, Qualcomm Kryo™ CPU and Qualcomm Adreno GPU.

“The Snapdragon 675 plays a primary role in allowing OEMs to design next generation features with incredible performance into their upcoming smartphones,” said Kedar Kondap, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “Packed with advanced gaming abilities, remarkable camera performance and a multi-core AI Engine, Snapdragon 675 based smartphones will bring new experiences to consumers globally.”

The Snapdragon 675 Mobile Platform provides new architectures and performance improvements over the Snapdragon 670 in the following areas:

Gaming: Most advanced games demand a lot out of a smartphone, which is where the Snapdragon mobile platform’s heterogeneous compute advantage comes into play, with Snapdragon 675 designed to deliver a high frame-rate, smooth gaming experience. Qualcomm Technologies is working with game developers to deliver next level gaming experiences to the 600 tier. A number of specific games and game engines have been optimized including Unity, Unreal, Messiah, and NeoX. Qualcomm Technologies also supports popular tools and APIs, including Vulkan, OpenGL 3.2, OpenCL, and Snapdragon profiler.

Capture: Unleashing the incredible power of the Qualcomm Spectra 200 series ISP, Snapdragon 675 is designed to enable smartphone users to capture images and videos in professional-grade quality during the day and night, in slow-motion and with the help of AI. Snapdragon 675 supports a triple camera configuration in the front or back, supporting features such as telephoto, wide angle, and super-wide image capture, as well as enhanced portrait mode (Bokeh), 3D face unlock and ‘epic’ selfies. Additionally, Snapdragon 675 provides limitless slo-mo – capable of recording extended slo-mo video clips in HD, not limited to one second or shorter bursts.

Artificial Intelligence: Snapdragon 675 Mobile Platform with a multi-core AI Engine is engineered to deliver up to 50% overall improvements in AI applications. The multi-core AI Engine is designed to improve mobile devices’ ability to acquire information and become the ultimate personal assistant by capturing photos and videos, learning and adapting to a user’s voice, and optimizing battery life. Through heterogenous computing, the Hexagon DSP, Adreno GPU, and Kryo CPU – are engineered to work cooperatively to run AI applications on-device faster and more efficiently. Additional AI use cases supported on Snapdragon 675 include camera (scene and object detection, image style transfer, portrait relighting), security (face unlock, payment security), voice and translation. Global ISVs also support the platform including Megvii (Face++), NetEase, SenseTime, Thundersoft, and Trio.AI.

Beyond the enhancements to bolster gaming, camera and AI experiences, Snapdragon 675 also includes DSP security designed to provide superior protection when unlocking a device via face recognition. The 675 features a Snapdragon X12 modem that will support downlink speeds up to 600Mbps and 3x carrier aggregation. Additionally, the Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+ is capable of charging a smartphone battery from zero to 50% in 15 minutes. Lastly, Support for Qualcomm Aqstic and Qualcomm aptX audio technologies will also be included.

The Snapdragon 675 Mobile Platform is presently available and will be expected in consumer devices starting Q1 2019.