Qualcomm announces further upgrades for the Snapdragon X65 5G modem alongside the new 778G SoC

Qualcomm has ushered the new Snapdragon 778G 5G processor onto the market (definitively, this time) as part of today's (May 19, 2021) 5G Summit. The company has confirmed that the new chipset will soon feature in upcoming phones from a number of OEMs: Xiaomi, Realme, OPPO, Motorola and Honor.

Besides this interesting hint at new premium mid-range mobile devices with up-to-date connectivity, Qualcomm has revealed more about what the Snapdragon X65 modem can do. It has already been teased as capable of speeds up to 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s); now, its maker has announced some new enhancements over its pre-existing specs.

They largely consist of expanded bandwidth for the 200MHz portion of the mmWave spectrum (thereby boosting the modem's global compatibility), as well as support for standalone mode in the same form of 5G. The X65 can now also avail of Qualcomm 5G PowerSave 2.0, a new efficiency mode conferred by the latest 3GPP Release 16 UE-Assisted Information technique, and may impart all day battery life on the modem.

These new "upgrades" are apparently unlockable via software within the architecture of the next-gen platform. Therefore, they might be supplied in some forms of the X65 sold by Qualcomm, but not others. The manufacturer is pitching the silicon at use-cases such as fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband, but is also rumored to come in high-end mobile devices, the upcoming iPhone 13 series included.

On that note, Qualcomm has also just launched reference M.2 modules for the X65, as well as its sibling the X62. They are intended to hasten the modems' adoption among OEMs. They support both sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G, and feature a plug-and-play design that might boost integration when developing new products.

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