The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 was announced earlier today, dubbed as the latest flagship mobile chipset from the chip maker. Instead of announcing it as the Snapdragon 875, the company renamed it and went straight for the “888” number instead of the usual “8×5” naming system.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 888
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 features the latest ARM architectures in the chip. There’s the new Cortex-X1 “Prime” Core and three Cortex-A78 performance cores within, with clock speeds the same as the Snapdragon 865. That being said, the cache has been doubled on both the performance and the Prime cores. The efficiency cores have also been kept the same, with four Cortex-A55 cores running at 1.8GHz. Qualcomm is claiming that the Snapdragon 888 is capable of up to 25% better CPU performance paired with the new Kryo 680 CPU cluster, allowing space for higher clocks with the Snapdragon 888+ in the future.
Graphics Performance
When it comes to graphics, Qualcomm is saying that the performance has been increased up to 35%, while being 25% more efficient. The Adreno 660 GPU now supports sub-pixel rendering, which can be helpful in improving visual quality on OLED displays that do not have the standard RGB sub-pixel layout. The Adreno 660 also supports variable rate shading (VRS), which allows better performance in games where the entire scene has yet to be rendered in full resolution.
AI Performance
As for AI performance, it has been improved together with the CPU and GPU. The Hexagon 780 can provide up to 73% better performance, with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 capable of 26TOPs.
Camera Performance
For cameras, Qualcomm utilized a triple ISP design called the Spectra 580 ISP. Processing capability has improved up by 35% to 2.7 Gigapixels/second, which enables zero shutter lag on three 28MP sensors at the same time. Alternatively, that also translates to single 84MP snapshots with no shutter lag, which is an increase from the 64MP on the SNapdragon 865. The Spectra 580 ISP can also record 4K HDR footage from three sensors simultaneously, with improved low-light performance by capturing images down to 0.1 lux.
Integrated Snapdragon X60 5G Modem
Finally, we have the new integrated Snapdragon X60 5G Modem on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chip. The Snapdragon 865 had a separate Snapdragon X55 5G modem, which resulted in the higher prices of mobile devices. By having an integrated 5G modem, this increases efficiency, saves real estate in building these smartphones, and better battery life. The maximum theoretical download speeds have been increased up to 7.5Gbps.
Most smartphone brands have already announced that their upcoming flagships will be running on the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888, so we’re pretty excited for what 2021 has to offer from these brands.
