While 5G is slowly going mainstream, 4G devices are not going away anytime soon, giving chip manufacturers time to release new 4G processors. Qualcomm, for their part, silently released a new 4G processor with the Snapdragon 678.
If the name sounds familiar, that’s because it is essentially an upgraded version of the Snapdragon 675 that came out in 2018. While it is also manufactured using a 11nm process and has the same Spectra 250L ISP, Snapdragon X12 LTE Modem and Hexagon 685 DSP–the main difference with the Snapdragon 678 is that its Cortex-A76 cores run higher at 2.2Ghz compared to 2Ghz on the Snapdragon 675. In addition, Qualcomm also promises better performance for its Adreno 612 GPU.
There’s no word as to when it will go official on phones, but expect the next crop of budget mid-range 4G phones to be powered by it.
