The Chinese smartphone market is the largest in the world and also the most lucrative. The competition in this market is so intense that even chip manufacturers battle for space. Unlike other markets, the Chinese smartphone market does not have a preference for Snapdragon chips. The Dimensity and Kirin chips are doing very well in the Chinese market. This is why Qualcomm can not push aside the needs of the Chinese market. The Amerian chip maker recently released the Snapdragon 888 SoC. The name of this chip seems strange because all the speculations point to Snapdragon 875.
However, Qualcomm has now provided an explanation for the nomenclature of this chip and who else but China can influence the name of a flagship chip. At the Snapdragon Technology Summit held in Hawaii, Qualcomm officially released a new generation of flagship chip Snapdragon 888. Snapdragon 888 adopts a new naming method, which was exposed before the official release, but at that time, some netizens thought it was a joke. However, it is now a reality. According to Qualcomm, it chose the “888” because this number is a very lucky number in China.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 technical specification
The Snapdragon 888 uses 1 x 2.84GHz (ARM’s latest Cortex X1 core) + 3 x 2.4GHz (Cortex A78) + 4 x 1.8GHz (Cortex A55) architecture. The GPU is Adreno 660 and it supports WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.
Gizchina News of the week
As the latest product of Snapdragon 8 series, Snapdragon 888 integrates Qualcomm’s third-generation 5G modem and radio frequency system – Snapdragon X60, which supports all major global millimeter wave and Sub-6GHz frequency bands, as well as 5G carrier aggregation, global multi-SIM card functions, Independent (SA) and non-independent (NSA) networking modes and dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS).
The sixth-generation Qualcomm AI engine integrated on the Snapdragon 888 5G mobile platform includes a newly designed Qualcomm Hexagon processor, with a performance of 26 trillion operations per second (26 TOPS). In terms of games, it integrates the third-generation Snapdragon Elite Gaming. Also, Qualcomm claims that this chip brings the most significant performance improvement ever made by Qualcomm Adreno GPU. It also comes with a 2nd generation Qualcomm Sensing Hub which “incorporates low-power always-on AI processing for intuitive intelligent features.”
In terms of camera performance, the Spectra ISP of Snapdragon 888 supports faster billion-pixel-level processing speeds. Users can process 2.7 billion pixels per second to take photos and videos. This is about 120 frames per second and each frame is 12MP. The processing speed is up to 35% higher than the previous generation platform.
The flagship processor also comes with the new 6th-gen AI Engine. The hexagon processor brings a considerable leap in AI performance, 26 tera operations per second (TOPS) compared to the last generation.