Qualcomm

As expected, on December 1, during the opening plenary session of the Snapdragon Tech Summit 2020 in Hawaii, Qualcomm announced the next generationof the flagship SoC Snapdragon 800series, which is not called Snapdragon 875, but Snapdragon 888. That is, yes, Qualcomm has broken the usual naming scheme for its processors.

Traditionally, the first ad came out purely nominal, and all the technical details about the new SoC Snapdragon 888,which will form the basis of most flagship smartphones in 2021, will be unveiled tomorrow. However, the manufacturer revealed some distinctive features of the novelty.

Key features of Snapdragon 888

  • 5 nm process technology with greater energy efficiency
  • Integrated 5G modem, third generation Qualcomm X60, compatible with NR Sub-6 GHz and NR mmWave, carrier aggregation and Dynamic Spectrum Sharing technology.
  • Supports 6E Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2.
  • The sixth generation of the AI Engine, responsible for accelerating the processing of artificial intelligence tasks. Performance has almost doubled compared to the previous generation: 15 to 26 TOPS (billions of operations per second).
  • Spectra's new high-performance image processor (ISP) captures photos and videos at 2.7 gigapixels per second, 35% faster than its predecessor. This will provide support for video recording with a full resolution of 12 MP to 120 fps, and will also reduce processing time for images from more than 100 MP to a fraction of a second.
  • Support for 144Hz displays and the next generation of Adreno integrated graphics, which will provide the "biggest" boost so far on the Snapdragon line.

Xiaomi's director confirmed that the next flagship Xiaomi Mi 11 will be one of the world's first smartphones in SoC Snapdragon 888. SoC Snapdragon 888 based smartphones are also being prepared by ASUS, BlackShark, Lenovo, LG, Meizu, Motorola, Nubia, realme, OPPO, Sharp, Vivo and ZTE. Surprisingly, Samsung is not on the list; perhaps with the launch of the Galaxy S21, the South Korean giant will completely switch to its own Exynos solutions.

As soon as a complete description of all the technical capabilities and parameters of Snapdragon 888 appears on the manufacturer's website, we will certainly study everything carefully and provide a brief extract with the most important details. Previous rumors attributed the Snapdragon 888 to a three-cluster CPU with a high-performance Cortex-X1 core (it's 20% faster than the Cortex-A77).