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A listing of what’s said to be a test device for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 670 appeared in the database of mobile benchmarking tool Geekbench earlier this week, suggesting that the next SoC from the San Diego, California-based tech giant will be looking to additionally bridge the gap between the company’s mid-range and ultra-premium chips. The specifications of the tested device appear to largely correspond with rumors from late December as Qualcomm apparently opted to test its octa-core chip inside a prototype that packs 6GB of RAM and is powered by an unspecified version of Android 8.1 Oreo. The energy-efficient quad-core cluster of the new chip was identified as being clocked at 1.71GHz, whereas previous rumors suggested it won’t run faster than 1.6GHz. That particular configuration is said to entail four Kryo 385 Silver cores, whereas the high-performance cluster supposedly has an equal number of Kryo 360 Gold cores whose frequency wasn’t tested as part of the newly uncovered benchmark.
The overall performance of the ARM64 chip appears to fall between the Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 835 and leans more toward the latter, suggesting the company is preparing to deliver a mid-range silicon that should be able to compete with its high-end offerings on most fronts and may even surpass it in terms of energy efficiency if rumors about it being built on Samsung’s first-generation 10nm FinFET process are correct. First Android devices using the Snapdragon 670 may be released by mid-2018, with Qualcomm being expected to officially announce the chip no later than spring.
Besides the Snapdragon 670, Qualcomm’s mid-range lineup for 2018 is also said to consist of the Snapdragon 640, with the performance difference between the two supposedly being comparable to the gap between last year’s Snapdragon 630 and Snapdragon 660. Additionally, the semiconductor manufacturer is also reportedly working on the Snapdragon 460 that’s said to provide a significant upgrade over the company’s budget-friendly chips from 2017. Following the recent rebranding of the Snapdragon 200 series, the firm is also expected to announce at least one new member of the Qualcomm Mobile Platform family but no specific details on its next entry-level silicon project have yet been mentioned by industry insiders, nor are such chips expected to be commercialized in most Western countries.
