Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 768G is 15-percent faster, supports Bluetooth LE Audio

Qualcomm’s second-best chip for 2020, the Snapdragon 765G, is just barely hitting the market, but that isn’t stopping the company from releasing a new and improved version. Today, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 768G, an overclocked version of the 765G.

Qualcomm is promising a 15-percent faster CPU and GPU compared to the Snapdragon 765G. Considering yearly upgrades from Qualcomm are only in the 25-percent range, that’s a pretty significant upgrade. The speed boosts are all from faster clocks. The main “Prime” CPU jumps up to 2.8GHz from the 2.4GHz of the 765G. Qualcomm doesn’t have official numbers for the Adreno 620 GPU, but we know it used to be 625MHz, so now it should be up around 725MHz.

The Snapdragon 768G isn’t just a speed boost. Qualcomm also lists “Support for Adreno Updateable GPU Drivers” and “Bluetooth 5.2” in the spec sheet.

The ability to update GPU drivers is something Google has been building into Android for years now, starting in 2017 with Android 8.0 Oreo and Project Treble. The idea is that SoC vendors or OEMs could ship new graphics drivers straight through the Play Store, allowing for GPU optimizations or bugfixes to be delivered just as easily as app updates. This year, Qualcomm said it is committed to shipping new Play Store GPU drivers for its SoCs on a quarterly schedule, and the Snapdragon 768G, along with the 765G and 865, are all part of that plan. We don’t yet know exactly what this will look like yet, since the first Play Store-based GPU update has not gone out yet. In China, where there is no Play Store, the first GPU driver update for the Snapdragon 865 apparently went out last month.

Bluetooth 5.2 is a jump up from the Bluetooth 5.0 on the Snapdragon 765G and the Bluetooth 5.1 on the higher-end Snapdragon 865. Bluetooth 5.2 adds what sounds like a pretty interesting feature: LE Audio. LE, or Low Energy, Audio promises exactly what it says on the tin: lower power usage and longer battery for your headphones (which would have to also support Bluetooth LE Audio). A new codec enables higher quality at lower bitrates, and lower bitrates mean less power usage. There’s also support for multi-stream audio, so you can beam music to multiple devices.

Other than that, this is just the Snapdragon 765G but a bit faster. It’s still an eight-core, 7nm SoC with 5G on board. Despite not being the fastest chip in the lineup, the 765G (and now 768G) managed to go out the door with a more integrated 5G design than the Snapdragon 865. The 765G/768G is Qualcomm’s first chip with a built-in 5G modem, which saves space and power over the separate (but faster) 5G modem in the Snapdragon 865. Support for the slower-but-more-practical sub-6GHz 5G standard is mandatory on all 765G/768G devices, while the faster mmWave standard is an optional extra that you’ll need to specifically look for in the spec sheet.

The first phone to ship the new Snapdragon 768G has already been announced in China, a new version of the Xiaomi Redmi K30 5G.