This year, Qualcomm unveiled the octa-core Snapdragon 615 processor, which is used to power middle-to-upper range phones and tablets, and unlike the Snapdragon 810, didn’t suffer from those pesky overheating issues.

Well, the US chip giant has recently announced the Snapdragon 616 as the successor to the Snapdragon 615.

The chipset features four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.7GHz plus four Cortex A53 cores at 1.2GHz and an Adreno 405 GPU. The silicon piece is manufactured using a 28nm process and comes with an integrated LTE modem.

Basically, the configuration is pretty similar to the Snapdragon 615, except for the fact that the clock speed has been bumped from 1GHz to 1.2GHz in the second cluster.

What is the Snapdragon 616 all about?

While the Snapdragon 616 is yet to make its way into devices, the chipset has already popped up on the AnTuTu benchmark, giving us a glimpse of what to expect from it.

Even if the difference between the two chips is not that great, it appears that the Snapdragon 616 will be able to deliver improved results compared to its predecessor.

It’s unclear whether the bump in clock speed is actually the reason behind the improvements, but what is obvious here is that the new silicon can perform significantly better than the Snapdragon 615.

In AnTuTu, the Snapdragon 616 managed to score 31,015 points while powering a Huawei phone (it’s the Huawei Maimang 4, which is headed for China with a 1080p 5.5-inch display and full metal body). To compare, the Snapdragon 615 scored only 26,000 points.

So, it seems like Qualcomm is crafting better chips to go into mid-range devices. We have been noticing a trend this year, where middle-range smartphones have started bringing to the table really cool features.

And this ascendant slope is bound to continue. The Snapdragon 616 offers support for 21MP cameras with video recording capabilities up to 1080p at 60fps and X5 LTE, so expect to see mid-rangers taking advantage of such features soon.