Recently, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 flagship processor was officially released. Compared with last year’s Snapdragon 865, it has a number of improvements. The most interesting part refers to the global 5G support, which means that Qualcomm’s real 5G chips have come. Many major manufacturers have already launched or are going to release smartphones powered by this chip. Among them, we can mention the Xiaomi Mi 11, VIVO X60 Pro+, iQOO 7, Samsung Galaxy S21, etc.
However, we should state that the previous Snapdragon 855 and Snapdragon 865 are still good in terms of performance. So they can stay afloat for two or more years. In this regard, it still causes a question whether the major Android smartphone makers can benefit from launching Snapdragon 888 handsets. Say, there are many users wondering whether the Kirin 9000 can compete with the Snapdragon 888. They mean whether the latter comes with so many advantages that the existing chips may appear out of competition.
Overall Performance Of Snapdragon 888
Qualcomm updates and upgrades its chips every year. And many manufacturers such as Xiaomi have begun using the products of Qualcomm, making it even more popular. Plus, its influence on the market has become unprecedented. Regardless of the processor, Qualcomm also has strong strength in the field of underlying communication services. Most smartphones sold internationally need to obtain communication patent authorization from Qualcomm, otherwise it will be difficult to gain market recognition.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 is currently Qualcomm’s top flagship chip. It has made huge improvements in four aspects: 5G connectivity, e-sports gaming experience, AI computing architecture, and mobile imaging technology. This also makes the Snapdragon 888 incomparable with the previous-gen chips, Snapdragon 865. From the perspective of 5G, the Snapdragon 888 is not only compatible with the two 5G frequency bands of millimeter wave and Sub-6GHz, but also supports the two major 5G networking modes of SA and NSA. Plus, it supports all 5G network solutions such as FDD, TDD and DSS. It almost runs through the global 5G communication network. In addition, the Snapdragon 888 comes with a built-in 5G baseband, rather than the selected plug-in mode, which has greatly improved communication capabilities, 5G performance and battery life.
Gizchina News of the week
In addition, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 uses Hexagon DSP design, which greatly improves the AI computing level. Through the Sensor Hub, it can reduce power consumption while ensuring the AI computing power level. So we can say apart from greatly improving the game performance, the ‘billion-pixel-level’ ISP has also improved the camera performance by a large margin. This has brought the chip performance of smartphones to the extreme level.
On the whole, the Snapdragon 888 is quite outstanding in many aspects compared with the current chip processors on the market. There is no doubt that the Snapdragon 888 will be the most-used in the industry in 2021.
Kirin 9000 Still Makes Competition
Well, we understand that the Snapdragon 888 is the latest flagship chip of Qualcomm and it will have many improvements. But it’s still questionable – isn’t there any chip comparable to it?
We also know that the Kirin chips are used in Honor and Huawei phones only. In this regard, the Huawei Mate 40 powered by the Kirin 9000 flagship chip is the best example to compare with. Both use 5nm processes. But they have different chip architecture and provide different performance and power consumption.
From the process point of view, both the Kirin 9000 and the Snapdragon 888 belong to the 5nm process family. From the perspective of CPU architecture, the Kirin 9000 integrates 15.3 billion transistors, and consists of a 3.13GHz Cortex-A77 core, three 2.54GHz Cortex-G77 cores and four 2.05GHz Cortex-G55 energy-efficient cores. The Snapdragon 888 is composed of a 2.84GHz Cortex AX1 super core, three 2.4GHz Cortex A78 cores and four 1.8GHz Cortex A55 small cores. You can see the performance of the Snapdragon 888 equipped with X1 and A78 overclocking cores is better.
As for the GPU, the Kirin 9000 has the full-level performance of the 24-core Mali-G78, while the Snapdragon 888 is equipped with Adreno 660, which has improved cache and memory bandwidth. The main purpose is to focus on low power consumption while taking into account the high performance of the product.
Also Read: Kirin 9000 Beats All Of Its Competitors In Master Lu Benchmark
According to the benchmark scores, Kirin 9000’s single-core score is 1001 points, and multi-core running score is 3653 points. A new Android phone equipped with the Snapdragon 888 has a single-core running score of 1135 points and a multi-core score of 3681 points. So, overall, the gap between the Kirin 9000 and Snapdragon 888 is not big. But the Snapdragon 888 is slightly stronger in terms of CPU and GPU attribute performance.