Snapdragon 865 details
Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm had its annual tech summit this week, where the company offered up some details for us to dig through in regards to its new Snapdragon 865 processor, via TechPowerUp. There's a lot of incremental upgrades in here as you'd expect, but that still leaves room for a ton of features we'll appreciate in future phones and tablets.
At the core of the chip are the Kryo 585 CPU and the Adreno 650 GPU, which Qualcomm says are up to 25% faster than the chips in the Snapdragon 855. Interestingly, this chip doesn't have any kind of onboard modem. Instead, it'll be paired with Qualcomm's X55 5G Modem-RF system. The X55G is capable of speeds up to 7.5 Gb/s according to Qualcomm, but even the zippiest 5G systems are way below this right now, so this is a purely theoretical best-case speed.
Back to the SD 865 itself, it does have some pretty cool (and mostly unsurprising) radios onboard. The chip includes support for Wi-Fi 6 (aka 802.11ax), of course. On the Bluetooth side, Qualcomm says this chip is the first to offer Super Wide Band support for voice over Bluetooth headsets. It also offers Fast Connect 6800 (faster pairing) and aptX Adaptive and Qualcomm True Wireless Stereo Plus. Those two should work together to improve latency, battery life, and sound, though some of it will likely require headsets that support the codecs.
Snapdragon 865 graphics and AI
On the graphics and image signal processing sides of the chip, we can look forward to a few cool features. The 865's Spectra ISP operates at 2 Gigapixels/sec, which means that it can handle recording 8K video or 4K video with HDR color, and can capture photos up to 200 megapixels in resolution.
Qualcomm says the SD 865 offers "desktop-quality gaming," and "ultra-realistic graphics," both of which are pretty uninformative. What is more interesting is that the 865 will feature support for 144 Hz displays, which opens the door for companies like Razer to put even more responsive displays on phones. The 865 will also support things like Qualcomm's Game Color Plus and Adreno HDR Fast Blend to improve color and image quality.
The Snapdragon 865 also brings in Qualcomm's 5th-gen AI engine, which delivers 15 TeraOPS of performance, making it roughly twice as powerful as the 855, but with 35% better power efficiency. Qualcomm says the AI engine will offer support for things like real-time language translation, and improved contexual awareness, but now we're waist-deep into features that handset makers have to support for them to matter. Stuff like image signal processing and Bluetooth improvements will affect just about every phone, while this stuff will be a bit more device-specific.
No phone makers have yet announced phones using the SD 865, so how effective all these improvements and features are is just talk and numbers on paper, but the question of when phone makers will start incorporating the Snapdragon 865 into devices is just a matter of when, not if.
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