Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 will land on phones in Q1 2021
As promised, more info following yesterday's Snapdragon 888 announcement. First off, as expected, the company's next flagship SoC will arrive in the first quarter of next year. We're still waiting on specific models, but as noted yesterday, the San Diego-based chip giant already has a lineup of smartphone makers planning to employ the 765 follow-up, including ASUS, Black Shark, LG, MEIZU, Motorola, Nubia, realme, OnePlus, OPPO, Sharp, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE.
The focuses are also what you'd expect: 5G, AI, speed, security, imaging and gaming. As Qualcomm announced earlier, the new system sports the third-gen X60 5G modem, which supports both sub-6 and mmWave variations of the wireless technology with speeds up to 7.5 Gbps. Also on board is support for Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2.
The sixth-gen version of the company's AI Engine brings faster processing speeds at lower power consumption - specifically up to 3x performance per watt, per Qualcomm's numbers. That's capable of up to 26 tera operations per second (TOPS). Compare that to the incredible" 5.5 TOPS the company was talking up on the Snapdragon 765 roughly this time last year. The AI stuff is primarily used to boost camera, gaming, connectivity and voice assistants like Google's.
On the camera side, the new chip features the improved Spectra 580, sporting the line's first triple ISP (image signal processor). That's going to go a ways toward fostering multi-camera setup, with the ability to simultaneously have three cameras at up to 2.7 gigapixels a second. The system also supports capture of three 4K HDR videos at once - overkill, perhaps, but neat. There's improved low-light support as well, to brighten up dark shots - always a nice thing.
The on-board Adreno 660 GPU can do up to 35% faster graphics. The Kryo 680 - based on the new Arm Cortex-X1 architecture - brings up to a 25% uplift in CPU performance. Game rendering has been improved by up to 30%, and titles will get access to Variable Rate Shading - a first for a Qualcomm chip. As for security, the new chip offers a number of new features aimed at protecting on-device data, including the Qualcomm Secure Processing Unit.