It was only a few months ago that Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 630 and 660 system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. If you're not familiar with the company's large SoC lineup, the 6xx series is roughly mid-range, used by phones like the Moto G5 and Moto X4. Now the company has announced yet another chip in the series, the Snapdragon 636.

The main reason why this chipset is so interesting is because it uses Qualcomm's special Kryo ARM cores. Specifically, it has the same Kryo 260 cores used in the Snapdragon 660. Qualcomm says this delivers a 40% increase in performance over the 630, which used generic ARM Cortex A53 CPU cores. Here are some of the key specifications of the 636:

SPECS

Modem

 Snapdragon™ X12 LTE

CPU

8x Kryo 260 cores, 64-bit, up to 1.8GHz

GPU

Adreno 509

Wi-Fi

 802.11ac Wave 2, 802.11n, 802.11a/b/g

Bluetooth

5.0

RAM

Dual-channel LPDDR4, up to 8GB

NFC

Supported

USB

Up to 3.1

Display

FHD+ (18:9) supported, 1080p for external displays

Charging

QuickCharge 4

Audio

aptX, Aqstic

Process

14nm

You can read the full laundry list of features here. If you don't know what any of that means, the important bits include the above-mentioned 40% speed boost, support for FHD 18:9 screens, improvements to image processing, and a 10% increase in gaming performance over the 630 thanks to a new Adreno GPU.

Qualcomm says that the SD636 uses the same pin layout as the 660 and 630, so OEMs can use the new chip without any major design changes. The company expects to start shipping the 636 in November of this year, so we should start seeing phones with it in late 2017/early 2018.

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