Qualcomm’s new flagship is the SOC Snapdragon 888

This week Qualcomm released “Snapdragon 888.” for 2021. So announced its flagship smartphone SOC. TL; The DR is that Qualcomm’s 2021 chip is a 5nm SOC with ARM Cortex-X1 core and Qualcomm’s first flagship SOC is dumping a mandatory two-chip 5G solution, with a 5-board non-board 5G modem that Qualcomm pushed the industry earlier this year. . With Snapdragon 865. Compared to the Snapdragon 865, Qualcomm will improve performance by 25 percent from CPU, 35 percent from GPU and 35 percent from ISP.

We should probably talk about the name first. Qualcomm’s general naming scheme (and rumor mill) would have built the chip “Snapdragon 875” after 865, 855 and 845 from previous years. The switch in the Snapdragon 888 is obviously allowed in Chinese culture, which sees 8 as the lucky number. The flight numbers of Chinese airports are often adored by them, the Beijing Olympics started at 8:08 pm local time on 8/8/08 at 8:08 pm local time, and now the flagship Android phones will be somehow more attractive – I think – Chinese Consumers, which also happens to create the world’s largest smartphone market. Marketing!

As always, the CPU is playing a game of eight cores very lucky with a single “prime” core for high performance duties, three medium cores to help with frontend functions, and four low-power cores for background processing. This year Prime Core is upgrading to ARM’s larger, newer Cortex-X1 core at 2.84GHz, while the mid-core Cortex A78 is being upgraded. The ancient A55 corps is still performing small-major duties.

ARM’s Cortex is a successor to the Core78 Corex A77 used in the previous General Snapdragon 865, and claims ARM design – which was reduced from 7nm to 5nm – resulting in 20% better “sustainable performance” in the same thermal Envelope as 7nm Cortex A76. The AR was built on ARM’s special focus on “performance, power, and field (PPA)”, meaning it strikes a balance between body size, power consumption, and CPU performance. This year the new big core is the Cortex-X1, designed with the A78 as a completely new size range for ARM. The X1 is a super-sized A78 that asks, “What if we don’t worry about power consumption and size?” And just go-all-out for performance, and the result is the key that ARM says will add “30 percent peak performance” to the A76. The idea is that the A78 is here for continuous performance, while the X1 is here to increase the cap on Bursti CPU performance, which is useful for loading apps and web pages.

Qualcomm never goes into too much detail about its GPU, but it does support Variable Rate Shading (VRS) this year, allowing game developers to fine-tune how each part of the display is rendered from frame to frame. If a scene is blurry, or a very moving object is moving too fast, it probably doesn’t need to be rendered in full resolution, allowing clever developers to squeeze more power out of the GPU, only those parts you can overlook. VRSA entered the PC in 2018 with Nvidia’s Turing GPU, and it’s supported in Vulcan and Unreal Engine (and DirectX), so some mobile games out there will actually use it.

The block diagram shows that Qualcomm’s “Fast Connect 6900 System” is integrated on 888 SC, which is Qualcomm-Speak for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. This means that Bluetooth 5.2 and the new Wi-Fi 6E will be supported if manufacturers put in additional functions and components to take advantage of it. The Wi-Fi 6E will ultimately be a big deal for gad residents, as it takes all the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 and adds a large chunk of 6GHz spectrum to the standard. Each country’s spectrum rules are different, but U.S. In, the Wi-Fi 6E will have three to six times the total spectrum of current Wi-Fi systems. Useful Spectrum If you skip calculating the spectrum allocated by DFS in the middle of the 5GHz Wi-Fi bands, most points ignore the access points default. This means that Wi-Fi 6E clients will work much better in crowded areas such as apartment apartment buildings, where nearby access points and clients can fill a large number of airwaves together and slow down the network to crawl. Early adopters will find all-new spectrum for themselves in the early days, and over time, Wi-Fi logguards will also see less competition for airwaves as everyone else switches.

Wi-Fi 6E compatibility was first possible for Qualcomm on the Snapdragon 865 Plus, but (while some false alarms have occurred) so far we have seen “the world’s first Wi-Fi 6E phone” on the market. No one beats Samsung on the punch, as long as it looks like the Galaxy S21 Ultra (no cheaper type) will be the first to come with Wi-Fi 6E in early 2021. We have not yet seen the 6E point access point, which you will also need to take advantage of the new spectrum. We’ve got to start somewhere, and that “somewhere” will be the flagship Android phones.

Fixing 5G, and other questionable useful additions

A major improvement over the Snapdragon 888 is undoing the loss of the Snapdragon 865, which divides Qualcomm’s SOC into two chips: a main SOC and a separate modem. To further push the 5G into the mainstream market, Qualcomm split the modem into a separate chip, and that, too, brought 4G for the ride. Two-chip solutions are usually larger, warmer, more power-hungry and more expensive than one-chip solutions. The power of Qualcomm’s multi-chip 5G solution to handle high power draw and heat, with larger bodies and larger batteries, increased the price of the phone by 2020. While it is expected that the 5G modem of early pay generation will come with size and power tradeoffs, Qualcomm moved 4G to a separate modem, but also brought the power-consumption downside to 4G and built it so you could not turn off only 5G areas. Without 5G coverage, that is Most areas.

The Snapdragon 888 is back on board with 4G and 5G connectivity. Given the sorry state of 5G networks we’re still not ready to say “5G is ready for prime-time”, but it looks like the hardware is getting there, at least. The Snapdragon 888 is equipped with a Qualcomm X60 modem, which was unveiled back in February (for some reason Qualcomm modems were unveiled a year ago). The X60 isn’t as fast as the 2020 X55 modem (7.5 Gbps down, good luck really getting it), but it does support all kinds of future-facing network capabilities. There is dynamic spectrum sharing, which allows carriers to run 5G networks over 4G spectrum. 5G Voice Is-Over-NR (VONR), aka Phone will make calls on 5G when we finally kill 5G LTE. The X60 can also connect to the Sub-6GHz 5G and MMWave 5G simultaneously, and also has support for multiple 5G SIMs.

Aside from that, there are many other useful differences of opinion and endings filled in Qualcomm’s latest society:

• Qualcomm says the Hexagon 780 co-processor is “completely redesigned” and offers a “three-fold improvement” in performance-per-view compared to the Snapdragon 865. You need an application using the right AI framework to take advantage. This extra silicone, and most apps don’t, but the qucom com camera says my apps, and voice games as helpers and possible targets. Qualcomm also says it will make Snapchat faster.
• The new ISP supports capture from three cameras Together. I came up with the idea when Qualcomm added two cameras to my stream, so you can record from the front and back cameras at the same time (Nokia vaguely calls this “two” instead of selfie) but Three? Qualcomm says this switching will make the camera lens faster, but it already happens on the Snapdragon 865 in a fraction of a second. I believe the Nokia 9 needed an extra chip to capture data from five rear cameras simultaneously, although that technology didn’t lead. For a great end result. Google’s Project Tango needed three cameras for 3D sensing (although today you can do AR with one camera). Maybe someone will create a crazy AI powered use-case for this.
• The Snapdragon 888 now features the Type-1 hypervisor, which Qualcomm has introduced as “a new way to secure and separate data between applications on multiple devices and multiple operating operating systems.” It sounds very interesting, but I’m not sure what new features to bring to consumer devices. This is the “Android chip” (the ARM laptop will use the Snapdragon 8 CX line), and instead of splitting into operating systems, features are already more readily available in Android through the work profile. You can already boot many of the guest OS-provided Android installations for testing. In the past, Google has explicitly stopped efforts on dual-booting Android with other OS, so don’t let your imagination get too wild. Maybe moderators will like it.

Your first shot with a Snapdragon 888 will probably be the Samsung Galaxy S21, pending in Q1 2021.