We’ve seen the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 series chipsets in smartphones for a while now, the new Snapdragon 700 series chipsets are strategically introduced as midway through these two series. The Snapdragon 700 series will be more efficient and powerful than the Snapdragon 600 series and will be slightly less powerful than the premium flagship Snapdragon 800 series.
The Snapdragon 700 series is aimed mainly at the mid-range devices, while there has been talking about the Snapdragon 700 series for a while now, we have only now finally seen the first two chipsets launch a few days ago. The Snapdragon 710 and the Snapdragon 730 chipsets are the first two chipsets launched in the new series.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 is the top variant in the Snapdragon 600 series, the Snapdragon 710 chipset is slightly more powerful than the Snapdragon 660. The new Snapdragon 710 chipset is designed using the Samsung 10nm Low Power Early(LPE) node and the SoC will come with support for 2 x 2 MU-MIMO dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 The Snapdragon 710 consists of 2 big and 6 smaller cores to offer the right blend of performance and power consumption. The 2 Kryo cores powered at 2.2GHz offer more power while the 6 smaller Kryo cores powered at 1.7GHz offer overall lesser power consumption for daily usage. The Snapdragon 710 SoC comes with the Adreno 615 GPU with clock speeds as high as 750MHz.
The Snapdragon 730 is built using an advanced 8nm LPP Samsung Process, this 8nm LPP uses 10% lesser power than the 10nm LPP, The Snapdragon 730 is one of the first chipsets to use this manufacturing process as Samsung had recently announced that their 8nm LPP was ready for production. The 8nm LPP also has 10% lesser surface area making it more efficient and compact, the Snapdragon 730 also comes with upgraded support for Bluetooth 5.1. The Snapdragon 730 is powered by a similar setup, the 2 Big Kryo cores have a clock speed of 2.3GHz while the 6 smaller Kryo cores have a clock speed of 1.8GHz. Also, the Snapdragon 730 uses Kryo 4xx series cores while the Snapdragon 710 uses lower powered Kryo 710 cores.
The Snapdragon 710 is decently powered with compliance for HDR 10 and is powerful enough to support 60FPS UI. The SoC also comes with a 250 ISP spectrum to support up to the 32MP sensor with 3 concurrent sensors, the Snapdragon 710 also supports UFS 2.1 storage, MMC and USB 3.1 ports. There is no NPU in the chipset and machine learning tasks need to be performed on the GPU or the Hexagon digital processor Vector eXtensions (HVX). The Snapdragon 730 chipset comes with similar features with additional improvements. The chipset supports Spectra 350 and adds FS2 sensor supports. The Snapdragon 730 comes with a dedicated NPU to further improve the machine learning handling.
