Qualcomm revealed the budget Snapdragon 768G just last month, but now the company is announcing another System-On-a-Chip intended for mid-range devices. The Snapdragon 690 will appear in phones later this year, and it aims to bring 5G connectivity to more affordable price points.
The Snapdragon 690 is a significant upgrade over previous 600-series chips in a few areas. Most notably, it's the first 6xx processor with 5G support, which was previously only available on higher-end 700x and 800x chips. That means we should start to see even cheaper devices with 5G over the coming months. However, the chipset does not appear to support mmWave 5G, which means it won't connect to AT&T and Verizon's existing 5G networks.
Video recording from a Snapdragon 690 phone
If you don't care about 5G at all, there are a few other key improvements worth mentioning. The Snapdragon 690 includes support for 4K HDR video capture at 30FPS, 120Hz displays, and Wi-Fi 6. The chipset also uses Qualcom's Kryo 560 CPU, reportedly offering a 20% performance boost over the Snapdragon 675's CPU. Artificial intelligence workloads (including video capture) should be faster as well, thanks to Qualcomm's fifth-generation AI engine.
Interestingly, the Snapdragon 690 is built on a smaller 8nm process, which likely made some of those performance improvements possible. This is the first 8nm chip in the Snapdragon 600 series, though it still doesn't match the 7nm process that the Snapdragon 768G and 865 use.
Qualcomm expects that the Snapdragon 690 will be widely available in the second half of 2020. "HMD Global [Nokia], LG Electronics, Motorola, SHARP, TCL, and Wingtech are among the OEMs/ODMs expected to announce smartphones powered by Snapdragon 690," the company said in a press release.
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