Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 690 will bring 5G to the masses
When you think of 5G smartphones, you might think of flagships. This is because flagships use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 which supports 5G, but that also means that those who can’t afford or don’t want to pay flagship prices won’t be able to get in on the 5G action, but that will change soon.
Qualcomm has recently announced their latest chipset in the form of the Snapdragon 690. With this new chipset, handset makers will now have access to a newer and more affordable 5G capable chipset, which in turn will help them make 5G smartphones more readily available to the masses.
So what kind of specs are we looking at? The Snapdragon 690 will feature eight cores which comprises of the big.LITTLE architecture of two Kryo 560 cores that are clocked up to 2.0GHz, while the other six cores are of the ARM Cortex-A55. The new chipset will also be able to support up to 8GB of RAM, and will feature the Adreno 619L GPU, and the Hexagon Tensor Accelerator AI Engine.
The Snapdragon 690 is not Qualcomm’s first attempt at making affordable 5G chipsets. The company also has the Snapdragon 765G which also supports 5G, but we imagine that the lower tier Snapdragon 690 will be more affordable. At this point in time, we’re not sure which phones will be taking advantage of it, but if you’re after an affordable 5G smartphone, they should be arriving in the not-so-distant future.
Source: XDA Developers