Following on from the likes of the Snapdragon 855+ and 765G at the tail end of 2019, chipmaker Qualcomm has now formally unveiled its latest gaming-focused Snapdragon 768G 5G-capable mobile system-on-chip.
The ‘768G mobile platform’ as Qualcomm calls it, is the most powerful entrant in the company’s latest 700-series mobile chips. As with the 765G, the ‘G’ stands for gaming, which in practice manifests as improved performance over their ‘G’-less counterparts (the same is true of the 855+, however, this is the only Snapdragon chip to push the ‘+’ nomenclature).
Oddly, unlike the Snapdragon 765 family, which has both a standard and enhanced ‘G’ variant, as of right now, there is no base Snapdragon 768, which could potentially hint at its arrival sometime soon. Nonetheless, the Snapdragon 768G takes the work that Qualcomm poured into the 765G and runs with it.
Built on a 7nm process – similarly to both the 765 and 865 lines, the 768 looks to use most of the same underpinnings as both the 765 and 765G. You’ll find a 1 + 1 + 6 architecture, with the same makeup of Kryo 475 Prime, Gold and Silver cores as the 765 and 765G.
The 768G differs in two fundamental ways; it’s leading Kryo 475 Prime core runs at a higher 2.8GHz clock (compared to 2.3GHz on the 765 and 2.4GHz on the 765G) and it offers support for Bluetooth 5.2 (in place of up to Bluetooth 5.0 on both 765 chips). This additional overhead is built with gaming and high-intensity app usage in mind.
The chip falls under Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite Gaming branding too and supports updateable Adreno GPU drivers as a result, despite the fact that its Adreno 620 GPU offers 15% fast graphics rendering than the 765G, not to mention support for 120Hz displays. Its X52 5G modem also brings support for mmWave, sub-6 and a number of other 5G technologies too.
The Snapdragon 768G arrived alongside the first phone to use it, in the form of Xiaomi’s Redmi K30 5G Racing Edition aka Redmi K30 5G Extreme Edition, currently only available in China.