Qualcomm today unveiled a new 700-series of Snapdragon chip which brings the best of its Snapdragon 800 Mobile Platform Series to chips with a significantly lower price tag. Qualcomm did not provide details or unveil any new Snapdragon 700 chip today except boast about its Snapdragon 700 Series products delivering up to 2x improvements for AI apps compared to its own Snapdragon 660 platform.

Qualcomm says its Snapdragon 700 series of chips will come with multi-core AI Engine, Hexagon Vector Processor, Adreno Visual Processing subsystem, and Kryo CPU. They will also feature the company’s own Spectra ISP to offer “professional grade camera features.” Thanks to the use of a new architecture across the board, Snapdragon 700 series will offer up to 30 percent improvement in power efficiency compared to the Snapdragon 660. The new Snapdragon chip will also support Quick Charge 4.0+ which promises to charge your smartphone’s battery from 0-50 percent in just 15 minutes.

In terms of connectivity, Snapdragon 700 tier chips will offer ultra-fast LTE and Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth 5.0, and more. Qualcomm says that it will start shipping out the commercial samples of Snapdragon 700 Series Mobile Platform to customers in the first half of 2018. This likely means that we should see Snapdragon 700-powered devices coming to the market until the very end of this year or even early 2019.

Looking at how Qualcomm compares the Snapdragon 700 Mobile Platform to Snapdragon 660, it is clear that it is preparing the former as a replacement for it. The company essentially wants to keep its Snapdragon 600 series chips for mid-range smartphones, while the Snapdragon 700 chips will find their way inside premium mid-range smartphones.