Last year, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 700-series SoCs to address a developing market segment that some have called "Premium B" to cope with the ongoing phenomenon of flagship cost runaway. The company later appended an offshoot skew in the 730G for the burgeoning gaming phone sector which presses value and performance to extremes. Today, in the same effective breath it announced the Snapdragon 865 with, the chipmaker has also spoken of the Snapdragon 765 and the 765G, and yes, they're the first in their series to get 5G support.

The company was a bit lighter on details for these chipsets than it was for its star product. We do know that their CPUs are made of eight Kryo 475 cores — six power-efficient cores, a performance core, and a "prime" core.  The new Hexagon 696 DSP with native Tensor processing is touted to be twice as powerful as its predecessor. The ISP is able to process simultaneous image capture and video at 4K in 10-bit HDR as well as the HLG and HDR10+ codecs. It also supports the aptX Adaptive audio codec which can prioritize latency over quality and vice versa as needed plus the Qualcomm Sensing Hub for ambient pick-up of voice commands. The Quick Charge version has not been specified, but it does have Quick Charge AI that can stretch a battery's useful life by up to 200 days.

As with the 730 and 730G, the only significant specification split between the Snapdragon 765 and 765G is how fast the Adreno 620 GPU is clocked: the normal version is said to be 20% faster than the 730's GPU while the gaming version is meant to be 20% faster than that. A suite of Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Gaming software features are targeted to deliver sharper HDR10 visuals and low latency for multiplayer via 5G. If you're just watching movies, the Adreno also supports Dolby Vision for playback.

Speaking of 5G, both packages come with the Snapdragon X52 modem which support millimeter wave and sub-6GHz spectrum on both time and frequency division distributions and Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (accessing a signal from a dual-mode 4G/5G tower) in "all key regions." These factors and a bunch of optimizations should help the X52 reap peak download speeds up to 3.7Gbps and uploads up to 1.6Gbps.

Stacking the DSP and GPU with the modem, Qualcomm touts a maximum workload of 5.5 trillion operations per second — roughly one-third the Snapdragon 865's top throughput. Still, 5.5 TOPS should be enough of a workout if the price and strategy is right for phone manufacturers.

The Snapdragon 765 and 765G will be available to OEMs in the first quarter, so expect some fresh phones featuring these chipsets mid-year 2020.

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