Snapdragon 780G unveiled to close in on flagship chipsets

The Snapdragon 780G is now official as a new 5nm platform from Qualcomm, this time for mid-range smartphones. It is the most advanced chipset available from the company after the flagship 8 series of processors.

The Snapdragon 780G is built on the same 5nm manufacturing process as the top-end Snapdragon 888. It is the successor to the Snapdragon 765G, that powered devices such as the OnePlus Nord and the Vivo X50 Pro in India. Some details are yet to be revealed, but it is said to be an octa-core processor with two high-performance Cortex A78 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and six Cortex A55 cores running at 1.8GHz. The production is likely to be done by Samsung Foundry.

“Since introducing the Snapdragon 7-series three years ago, more than 350 devices have launched based on 7-series mobile platforms. Today, we are continuing this momentum by introducing the Snapdragon 780G 5G Mobile Platform,” said Kedar Kondap, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Gaming on a Snapdragon 780G smartphone — (Image credit: Aakash Jhaveri)

The Snapdragon 780G uses an optimized Snapdragon X53 5G modem, supporting theoretical peak download speeds of 3.3 Gbps over sub-6GHz frequencies. It also supports Wi-Fi 6, advanced Wi-Fi 6E and Snapdragon Sound for improved audio transmission over Bluetooth.

The Snapdragon 780G is the first 7 series platform with a triple ISP (Image signal processor), capable of shooting with three different cameras simultaneously – think capturing from the zoom, wide, and ultra-wide lenses at once. HDR10+ video capture, 4K HDR, improved low-light photography and more are also enabled by the Qualcomm Spectra 570 ISP.

Gamers will be glad to know that the Snapdragon 780G also brings the Elite Gaming suite of features will also make the cut, allowing for updateable drivers, higher refresh rates and 10-bit HDR visuals. It also makes strides on the AI front, with the 6th gen AI Engine and the Hexagon 770 processor, capable of achieving throughput rates of up to 12 TOPs, which a 2x improvement over its predecessor. These will also help during calls via software-based noise suppression and voice assistant interactions.

Devices powered by the Snapdragon 780G chipset are expected to arrive in the second quarter of 2021. No OEM partners were revealed.

Via