To enable that, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 comes with the Hexagon 685 DSP which can be found on the company’s flagship chipsets including the Snapdragon 845. Its always-on and always-sensing nature essentially allows phones to react quicker to machine learning queries. That also means phones with the Snapdragon 670 can have always-listening virtual assistant features too. Compared to the Snapdragon 660, Qualcomm says the addition of the Hexagon 685 has led to an uplift in AI performance of nearly 1.8x. Like other Qualcomm chips, the Snapdragon 670 is also compatible with all the frameworks and tools such as TensorFlow, Android NNAPI, and more. In real life scenarios, this should translate to quicker processing for AI effects, Portrait modes, and others. The Snapdragon 670 promises improvements for gaming too. With the included Adreno 615 GPU, Qualcomm claims a surge of about 25% as far as graphics rendering is concerned. Moreover, the Snapdragon 670 employs the same Kryo 360 CPU setup available on the Snapdragon 710. The octa-core arrangement houses two performance cores and six efficiency cores resulting in a 15 percent bump up over the Snapdragon 660. The former has a maximum clock speed of 2.0Ghz and the latter, 1.7Ghz. The Snapdragon 710, while has the same clock speed for the efficiency cores, can reach up to 2.2Ghz for the performance ones. The Snapdragon 670 also features an upgraded ISP. It has the Spectra 250 ISP which supports up to 25-megapixel for a single-camera and 16-megapixel if they are two of them. Furthermore, the Spectra 250 lets the chipset to consume 30% less power while performing resource-intensive camera tasks such as stabilization and noise reduction. It’s compatible with a maximum screen resolution of Full HD+ and features the X12 LTE modem which is designed to offer a more reliable connection even in regions with weak coverage. The modem supports download speeds of up to 600Mbps and a maximum 150Mbps upload speed. While the new chipset does come with Qualcomm Aqstic Audio for richer inputs, it misses out on AptX. Phones with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 Mobile Platform are expected to arrive in the next few months (Q3 2018).
