Qualcomm fills in the blanks, unveils Snapdragon 700 series platforms

If you're using a flagship Android phone, you likely have an 800-series Snapdragon processor. If you're using a mid-range phone, chances are your Snapdragon chip starts with a 6. If you're rocking an entry-level phone, it's probably a 200- or 400-series Snapdragon.

Today, Qualcomm is going odd, announcing a Snapdragon 700 series, cribbing a number of features from its high-end Snapdragon 800s without the eye-watering prices.

The announcement doesn't specify any particular platform names — the series encompasses multiple chips being sourced to manufacturers later this year, for debut late 2018 or early 2019 — but the company says that the chips will have twice the AI performance as the top-tier 600-series chip, the Snapdragon 660, while retaining most of the Spectra ISP, Hexagon DSP, Kryo CPUs, Adreno GPUs and ultra-fast LTE connectivity of the 800 series.

Qualcomm says all chips in the Snapdragon 700 series will offer "up to 30% improvements in power efficiency, and better performance and battery life across numerous applications compared to the Snapdragon 660 Mobile Platform," and be capable of charging using the company's proprietary Quick Charge 4 tech.

Daniel Bader

Daniel Bader was a former Android Central Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editor for iMore and Windows Central. 

6 Comments
  • Odd... Time for High-mid-ends..! Yay! ...
  • Nothing surprising. With flagship prices rising to the dangerous 1k$ levels, there should be more and more almost-flagships. We should be seeing more phones like Galaxy A8 and Xperia X, hopefully.
  • Absolutely agree.
  • We have seen more affordable priced phones, with great specs... The trouble is they originate from Chinese businesses like Huawei, ZTE, and Vivo. US government Intel agencies want a ban on Chinese phones because they claim security threats. A counter argument is the US government doesn't want good, cheap Chinese phones dumped in American markets through mobile carriers Huawei didn't help itself when they got too aggressive marketing their new phones on Amazon, posting fake reviews of an unreleased phone.
  • This is because of the new Dynamic IQ scheme introduced by ARM, which is the replacement for big little it allows for many more combinations of small cores with big cores...so that means all of these will be A-75 & A-55 based giving more choices as to tailored performance and price points. Qualcomm are a bunch of liars as to how there cores are better than everyone, they are all based closely on the arm designs.
  • The upper 600 series (652/653/660) was already pretty solid in performance but not very common outside of Asian markets. We're starting to see a few 660-equipped phones in the US but not many. It'd be nice to see more phones like the Nokia 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy A8/A8+ come to the US. Maybe Motorola will come up with something.