It's only been almost a quarter since Qualcomm launched its Snapdragon 670 mid-range chipset, but today, the company is already bringing out a slightly beefier Snapdragon 675, which is clearly designed with three smartphone trends in mind: Gaming optimization, multiple cameras and AI-enhanced features (including face unlock). Announced at the 4G/5G Summit in Hong Kong, the Snapdragon 675 features Qualcomm's brand new fourth-generation Kryo CPU -- the Kryo 460 with two high-power 2GHz cores and six low-power 1.7GHz cores -- which apparently gives a notable boost to its everyday performance and gaming performance. For instance, compared to the Snapdragon 670, the new Snapdragon 675 is claimed to launch games 30 percent faster and offers 35 percent faster web browsing. In the case of gaming, the Snapdragon 675 also leverages from further software optimization for smoother gameplay, along with prioritized connectivity to ensure minimal interruption. Qualcomm listed PUBG and King of Honor being two of the handful of games that already benefit from these features, with the latter title even able to run at up to 60 fps -- not bad given that the GPU is just a mid-range Adreno 612, though we shall see whether it runs just as well outside of the lab, especially when this chipset is fabricated using an 11nm LPP process instead of the finer 10nm.

While Qualcomm's recently announced Snapdragon 700 chip seemed like its answer for AI in lower cost phones, the company hasn't forgotten about its mid-tier series. The new Snapdragon 670 also centers on speedier AI performance when it comes to computer vision, as it's around 1.8-times faster than the previous generation Snapdragon 660. Notably, the Hexagon 685 DSP delivering all of that speed first appeared on the high-end Snapdragon 845 last December. The Snapdragon 670's Adreno 615 GPU is 25 percent faster than before, making it even better suited for games (which will also see a benefit from the faster AI performance). And the new Kryo 360 CPU is 15 percent faster than the last chip.