Qualcomm and MediaTek are the two most popular chip makers for smartphones globally. While Qualcomm has an edge in the flagship section, MediaTek is quite good with mid-range and entry-level chips. Most of the 2021 Android flagships use Qualcomm’s latest flagship processor, Snapdragon 888. According to reports, Qualcomm will release the Snapdragon 888 Pro chip in the second half of this year.
Recently, a “Qualcomm Lahaina” device appeared on the GeekBench running sub-site. This may be an engineering machine with Snapdragon 888 Pro. However, the report claims that this chip is the Snapdragon 888+ SoC. The X1 super-large core has been increased from 2.84GHz to 3.0GHz, the other core frequencies remain unchanged. The Prime CPU core (Cortex-X1) will be the one with 3GHz, the 3x Performance Cores (Cortex-A78) will have 2.42 clock speeds and the 4x Efficiency CPUs (Cortex-A55) will go up to 1.8GHz. The CPU scores 1,171 points in single-core tests and 3,704 in the multi-core department. However, there is no information on the GPU frequency. At present, the score is not much different from the normal version.
According to Weibo blogger @DCS, there are Snapdragon 888 4G, Snapdragon 888 WiFi, and Snapdragon 888 Pro devices. The blogger also said that these devices will be available this year. They will also decentralize the mid-end of Snapdragon 888.
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Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 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.
As the latest product of Snapdragon 8 series, SD888 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 SD888 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.