At yesterday’s Snapdragon Summit 2020, Qualcomm unveiled the next-generation Snapdragon 888 flagship mobile SoC. It’s the next generation of 5G flagship SoC for smartphones.
Also, during the presentation, the American company made a couple more loud statements. The Snapdragon 888 is Qualcomm’s most advanced SoC to date, with a huge investment behind it. Qualcomm said it has spent $66 billion on research and development. Of course, the money was not only spent on the Snapdragon 888, but it’s Qualcomm’s long-term investment over the years.
Today, creators of new SoC platforms are focusing on fifth-generation networks. Qualcomm predicts 5G mobile phone sales will reach 450 to 550 million units in 2021, with 750 million 5G smartphones shipped in 2022.
Also at yesterday’s performance, a lot of attention was paid to mmWave millimeter waves, which have already received the approval of US operators. 5G millimeter-wave speeds will be 11 times faster than up to 6 GHz. In this case, the peak speed could reach double this figure.
Xiaomi will launch the first Snapdragon 888 smartphone, and Qualcomm has confirmed its willingness to work with Honor. Meizu promises to release the Meizu 18 next spring. Also on the list are Oppo, Realme, Vivo, ZTE, Asus, Black Shark, LG, Motorola, Nubia, Sharp and other companies.
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.
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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.
