Qualcomm

With the price of electronics seemingly going up every day, Qualcomm is looking to give manufacturers more options with the release of two new mobile chips intended for use in upcoming midrange and affordable phones.

The Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 is the more powerful of the two and will slot in under the beefier Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 lines. It features a Qualcomm Kryo CPU with eight cores (four performance and four efficiency) and an Adreno GPU that the company claims is 21 percent more powerful than last year's Gen 4 SoC. Aside from better performance, new features for this generation include Qualcomm's Snapdragon Smooth Motion UI which promises to provide 20 percent faster app launches and 18 percent less screen stutter.

Qualcomm

Other features include support for AI camera and display tools such as Intelligent Night Vision that should boost the clarity of low light photos, AI-powered digital zoom at up to 100x magnification and improved HDR10 video processing. On the connectivity front, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 also offers sub-6GHz 5G (but not mmWave), Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0 with new Channel Sounding tech designed to allow users to locate accessories like wireless earbuds and speakers using their phone.

As you'd expect based on its name (four is less than six, after all), the Snapdragon 4 Gen 5 is a slightly less powerful chip designed to provide a good mix of processing power, energy efficiency and wireless connectivity for even more affordable handsets. Like its sibling, the SD4 Gen 5 also comes with Smooth Motion UI that reduces screen stutter by 25 percent and boosts app launch speed by 43 percent along with even larger gains in graphics performance year-over-year. Qualcomm says its GPU is 77 percent faster compared to its predecessor while also providing enough horsepower to support 90fps gaming for the first time.

Qualcomm

Another upgrade on the Snapdragon 4 Gen 5 is support for Dual SIM Dual Active tech which allows a phone to use data from two different SIMS/carriers at the same time. That said, this is largely a feature for regions outside of the US where phones with two SIM slots are much more prevalent. As for connectivity, the SD4 Gen 5 isn't quite as impressive as it only features Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.1, though you do still get support for sub-6GHz 5G.

One important thing to remember is that while Qualcomm's new processors offer support for the features detailed above, it's ultimately up to manufacturers to implement those capabilities on actual retail devices. And while no OEMs have announced specific models based on these chips just yet, Qualcomm says phones featuring the Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 and Snapdragon 4 Gen 5 should arrive sometime later this year or early 2027 from Honor, Redmi, Oppo and Realme.