Qualcomm wants to counter the lack of chips in two ways
One from Samsung, one from TSMC: The Snapdragon 778G and Snapdragon 780G are produced by two contract manufacturers.
Qualcomm has introduced the Snapdragon 778G (SM7325), a system-on-a-chip (SoC) intended for premium smartphones. It follows on from the older Snapdragon 768G and has significantly more performance, but above all the SoC is no longer produced by Samsung Foundry, but by the larger competitor TSMC.
The name of the Snapdragon 778G is reminiscent of the Snapdragon 780G, as Qualcomm frankly confirms when asked. The aim is to provide partners and customers with flexible solutions, which is why the commissioning of two SoC producers makes sense, especially with a view to the current chip shortage.
The Snapdragon 778G uses eight cores in a four plus four structure, with Qualcomm again using the Cortex-A78 and Cortex-A55. There is also a graphics unit called Adreno 642L and a 32-bit interface for LPDDR5-6400 memory. According to Qualcomm, the CPU performance should increase by 40 percent and the GPU performance by 40 percent compared to the Snapdragon 768G, which roughly corresponds to the performance increase from the 768G to the 780G (plus 40 percent and plus 50 percent).
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Lots of similarities between the 778G and 780G
The other key data also sound very similar: The Snapdragon 778G uses a Hexagon 770 as an integrated DSP (Digital Signal Processor): It has a faster tensor and a faster scalar unit as well as its own SRAM memory. Thus, the combined inferencing performance for artificial intelligence should increase from 5.4 to twelve teraops, which is good for photos with computational photography. The Spectra 570L is also available as an ISP (Image Signal Processor); it creates three 22-megapixel images in one go. Alternatively, one is shot with 192 megapixels or a 4K video is recorded and taken at the same time with 36 megapixels.
Other components of the Snapdragon 778G are a Snapdragon X53 for 5G with up to 3.7 gigabits per second downstream at sub 6 gigahertz or mmWave and a Wi-Fi 6E subsystem with 2 × 2 antenna configuration including Bluetooth 5.2 including Bluetooth LE for Audio. Qualcomm assumes that the Snapdragon 780G will be in smartphones in the second quarter of 2021. Honor, iQoo, Motorola, Oppo, Realme and Xiaomi were named as partners.
The author of the article is Marc Sauter.
