Snapdragon 695G Could Give Mid-Range Phones A Gaming Boost

For almost three quarters straight, MediaTek has managed to wrest the crown from Qualcomm in the mobile application processor (AP) market. Part of its winning strategy is to throw everything it has on a wall and see which ones stick, mostly targeting mid-range phones in both 5G and LTE categories. Qualcomm, of course, hasn't been absent there, and its upcoming Snapdragon 600 series chips are clearly its latest attempt to reclaim its throne in that mid-tier market, especially when it comes to gaming.

Qualcomm has always had a "G" variant for some of its chips under both the Snapdragon 6 series and the Snapdragon 7 series. These are slightly tweaked processors with added features or clock cycles intended for more resource-hungry games. Mobile games, however, have become even more demanding, and gamers' tastes have also leveled up, even if their phones haven't.

The upcoming SM6375 might be Qualcomm's response to that growing demand, or at least the gaming variant of the next 5G SoC. The biggest draw of this processor will be support for display refresh rates up to 144Hz, something that is quickly becoming a trend in gaming-oriented smartphones. Of course, that still presupposed that a mid-range smartphone would use a 144Hz display, though that, too, might be more common by the time this chipset launches.

WinFuture theorizes that this SM6375 will be marketed as the Snapdragon 695 and 695G. What strikes the tech site as a bit odd is that there are four SKUs or "models" for it with different clock rates. The highest will have four "gold" cores at 2.5GHz and four "silver" cores running at 2.2GHz, definitely decent for most games.

There is also an SM6225 that could be a successor to the Snapdragon 665 (which can't use the existing Snapdragon 670 name). This one, however, has less muscle than the Snapdragon 695 and might not even have a 5G modem. There is no word yet on when these mid-range chipsets will be announced.