Qualcomm
On Thursday, Qualcomm announced its newest midsize mobile processor – the Snapdragon 780G, a 5 nm part that succeeds last year’s 765. The Snapdragon 700 series is a mid-range line that offers features similar to the flagship of the Snapdragon 800 series, but with slightly lower performance for significantly less cost.
Superficially, it’s easy to look at last year’s Snapdragon 768G and this year’s 780G and see a similar product: an octa-core processor with Adreno GPU. But while the nucleus count remained constant, the nucleus types did not.
The previous Snapdragon 700 series SoCs used a “faster” Cortex A-76 core, another “almost as fast” Cortex A-76 and six “slow and low” Cortex A-55 cores that can perform background tasks with a minimum battery drain. The new 780G changes things, with three fast secondary cores and only four slow cores:
| SoC | Faster core | Fast core (s) | Slow / Efficient Cores |
| Snapdragon 768G | 1x Cortex A-76 at 2.8 GHz | 1x Cortex A-76 at 2.4 GHz | 6x Cortex A-55 at 1.8 GHz |
| Snapdragon 780G | 1x Cortex A-78 @ 2.4 GHz | 3x Cortex A-78 at 2.2 GHz | 4x Cortex A-55 at 1.9 GHz |
This seems to us a very big change, and highlights how much room for maneuver is in a word like “octa-core” in modern large / small CPUs, where the different cores have very different capacities and performance levels.
The 780G also receives an updated GPU – Qualcomm says its Adreno 642 achieves a 50 percent performance increase over the Adreno 620 on the 768G. Anandtech’s basic math puts it almost on a par with the Adreno 640 in the flagship of the Snapdragon 855 from late 2018.
The Snapdragon 780G offers a new and improved Hexagon 770 AI processor, with an additional low-power AI accelerator that can handle tasks such as filtering out wind and background noise during calls without draining battery power. There is also support for 5G and Wi-Fi 6E modems and an image signal processor that can process three 25 MP images simultaneously. This allows a phone with a triple lens array to capture images from large, ultra-large and telephoto cameras with a single click.
Qualcomm says the first devices equipped with the Snapdragon 780G are expected to start shipping in the second quarter of 2021.