Qualcomm recently launched the Snapdragon 665 chipset as a successor to the Snapdragon 660. The Snapdragon 660 chipset has been commonly seen on many smartphones especially in the Rs 20,000 price segment. The Snapdragon 665 chipset is a slight upgrade over the Snapdragon 660 and brings major improvements for the budget-oriented smartphones. This chipset is likely below the Snapdragon 675 and the Snapdragon 700 series.
The Snapdragon 660 chipset was based on 14nm manufacturing process; however, the Snapdragon 665 chipset is based on more advanced 11nm architecture. This increases the efficiency of the chipset and helps improve performance. The Snapdragon 710 SoC uses an even advanced 10nm manufacturing process while the Snapdragon 730 uses even more superior 8nm manufacturing process for the development of the chipset.
The Snapdragon 665 and the Snapdragon 660 chipsets are both based on Kryo 260 cores, however, the Snapdragon 665 uses an octa-core setup with clock speeds up to 2.0GHz while the Snapdragon 660 clock speeds vary from 1.95GHz to 2.2GHz. The Snapdragon 665 also uses the AIE technology of Qualcomm to improve AI and Machine Learning tasks handling via the Qualcomm Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX), Qualcomm Hexagon 686 Processor, and the Qualcomm All-Ways Aware technology.
Most of the Cellular and networking capabilities have remained the same through the chipsets including the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and LTE modems. The Snapdragon 665 however, uses a Spectra 165 ISP that supports capturing images in as much as 48MP resolution, the chipset also supports recording ultra-slow motion in 720 resolution at 240FPS similar to the previous model. The GPU on the Snapdragon 665 is the same identical variant as the Snapdragon 660, both the SoC’s come with Adreno 512 GPU.
Unlike the new Snapdragon 700 series, the Snapdragon 665 is more of an incremental upgrade to the already perfect Snapdragon 660 chipset with subtle improvements instead of drastic upgrades.
The Snapdragon 660 is already used in some of the good mid-range devices such as the Realme 2 Pro, OPPO K1, OPPO R17 Neo, Vivo V11 Pro, Honor 8X Max, while the Snapdragon 665 is yet to arrive into the retail market on any device, so it would be interesting to see how it would fare when compared to the Snapdragon 660 that is doing really well.
