Qualcomm's Snapdragon 700 series sits in an odd place in the market, one we don't really see in the US. The not-quite-flagship SoCs don't have quite the oomph the 800 series does, but the differences are strong enough to pull it away from the more mid-range 600 series. The newly announced Snapdragon 712 has an interesting, in-between state itself: On paper, it's essentially a Snapdragon 710 with clock bump.

The new SoC has almost all the same specs, sporting 8 Kryo 360 cores, an Adreno 616 GPU, a Hexagon 685 DSP, Qualcomm's Spectra 25o ISP, and an X15 LTE modem. It supports the same 32MP single or dual 20MP camera resolutions, the same machine learning frameworks, the same 800Mbps LTE speeds, the same Bluetooth 5, etc. In other words, it isn't really delivering any big new features over the version announced last May.

The only differences I can spot between the two in the materials published by Qualcomm is a very slight bump in max clock, from 2.2 GHz to 2.3, and an upgrade to Quick Charge 4+ over the now pedestrian Quick Charge 4, which promises up to a 50% charge in 15 minutes. (There may be one more difference: Qualcomm's marketing materials for the 710 are inconsistent, claiming a Hexagon 685 DSP in one location and a Hexagon 680 in another so the 712 may have a slightly newer DSP, depending on which is correct.)

On paper, it looks like the 712 and 710 share a similar relationship to the previous 820 and 821, with some under-the-hood tweaks to eke out a bit more performance. As before in the case of the 820 and 821, Qualcomm is promising up to 10% performance gains from the new chip.

Either way, that potential performance difference won't really matter here in the US until we start to get phones using either of these SoCs. For more sordid, nerdy details, you can check out Qualcomm's full product brief and spec table here (direct PDF link warning).

[srrc]Qualcomm (1), (2)[/src]