As expected, on December 1, during the plenary session opening the annual Snapdragon Tech Summit 2020 in Hawaii, Qualcomm announced the next generation of the flagship Snapdragon 800 series SoC, 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 announcement 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 revealed tomorrow. However, the manufacturer still revealed some distinctive features of the novelty.
For clarity: Snapdragon 888 is the replacement for the already well-known Snapdragon 865 and the model with the index 875 will most likely not exist at all.
Main features of Snapdragon 888
- More energy efficient 5nm process technology.
- Built-in 5G modem – Qualcomm X60 3rd generation – with support for NR Sub-6 GHz and NR mmWave, carrier aggregation and Dynamic Spectrum Sharing technology.
- Supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 .
- The sixth generation of the AI Engine, responsible for accelerating the processing of artificial intelligence tasks. The performance has almost doubled compared to the previous generation – from 15 to 26 TOPS (trillion 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 in full 12 MP resolution at 120 fps, and will also reduce the processing time for 100+ MP images to a fraction of a second.
- Support for 144Hz screens and the next generation of Adreno integrated graphics, which will deliver the “biggest” boost ever in the Snapdragon lineup.
Also Read: Huawei’s 7nm Kirin 810 Beats Snapdragon 730
Smartphones based on SoC Snapdragon 888 are also being prepared by ASUS, BlackShark, Lenovo, LG, Meizu, Motorola, Nubia, realme, OPPO, Sharp, vivo and ZTE. Remarkably, Samsung is not on the list – perhaps with the release of the Galaxy S21, the South Korean giant will completely switch to its Exynos solutions.
