Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 Made for ACPCs Officially Released

When the Snapdragon 845 was announced, the net never stopped buzzing about the next-gen Snapdragon chip. It’s been assumed the Snapdragon 855 will release at the end of the year. However, this platform won’t launch until the mentioned date. But it doesn’t mean there is no chance to see other products from Qualcomm. As you guess, we are talking about the much-rumored Snapdragon 850. Today, at the Taipei Computer Show the manufacturer announced the SND850.

Previously, Roland Quandt stated the Snapdragon 850 is going to be the enhanced variant of the Snapdragon 845. Its main goal is to reach up to 3GHz of clock speed. But it wouldn’t be used in smartphones. Instead, we’ll it in Windows 10-running laptops. Theoretically, this chip can be put in smartphones, but they wouldn’t provide sufficient cooling conditions.

The newly launched Snapdragon 850 has been designed for Always Connected PCs (ACPC). Qualcomm promised that the new PC’s performance will be enhanced by 30%, AI’s performance will be increased by 3 times, LTE’s connection speed will be the fastest at 1.2Gb/s, and the continuous use time will be up to 25 hours.

Qualcomm also highlighted some of the Snapdragon 850 features:

• X20 LTE modem: The maximum download speed reaches 1.2Gbps, and the maximum upload speed reaches 150Mbps.
• Kryo 385 CPU based on ARM Cortex: Clock speed up to 2.96GHz.
• Adreno 630 vision processing subsystem: Supports Open GL ES 3.2, Open CL 2.0, Vulkan, DirectX 12, can handle Ultra HD Premium images with 4K 30fps specification and can handle slow-motion HEVC video. As for FUD (1080p) specs, the highest frame rate can reach 120fps. It also supports H.264 (AVC), H.265 (HEVC), VP9, DisplayPort (based on USB Type-C).
• Hexagon 685 DSP: Hexagon Vector DSP (HVX), Hexagon Scalar DSP (audio) and Hexagon All-Ways Aware Hub (sensor).
• Spectra 280 ISP: If it is a 16MP single-camera, you can use real-time zero-delay shooting (ZSL) at 60fps. But if it is a dual 16MP camera, you can take a 30fps ZSL image. If it’s only a 32 MP camera, you can capture 30fps ZSL images. Apart from this, it supports Multi-Frame Noise Reduction technology, Hybrid Focus (Hybrid Autofocus) technology, with dual-phase detection (2PD) sensor, capable of recording 4K 30fps UHD Premium video.
• Wi-Fi 802.11ad Multi-gigabit: Supports 802.11ac 2×2 (MU-MIMO) standard and supports 2.4GHz/5GHz/60GHz.
• Audio: With Aqstic audio codec and speaker amplifier, aptX audio playback (aptX Classic and HD compatible), Native DSD (direct DSD data transfer), PCM (up to 384kHz/32bit).
• RF: Supports TruSignal adaptive antenna tuning technology and HPUE (High-power transmit) technology.
• Bluetooth: Compatible with Bluetooth 5 standard.
• Positioning: Supports GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, and SBAS.
• Charging: Supports Quick Charge 4+ fast charging technology.