Following a preview yesterday Qualcomm has released the full details of their next top of the line 5G powered mobile SOC, the Snapdragon 888. The SD888 is Qualcomm’s first fully integrated 5G series 8 SOC with Qualcomm moving the processor, modem, AI co-processor, graphics and image processing all into the main chip.
This new chip is promising 3rd generation 5G support including all 5G bands, multi-SIM 5G, carrier aggregation, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. With the Kryo 580 CPU including 1x Cortex-X1 + 3x Cortex-A78 cores clocked to a maximum of 2.84 GHz, Hexagon 780 AI processor, Spectra 580 Image Signal Processor and Adreno GPU Qualcomm is claiming 25% improvement in overall CPU performance, 35% improvement in graphics performance and a 20% reduction in battery usage.
Bringing all of the subcomponents into the main SOC makes the Snapdragon 888 unsurprisingly the most powerful yet power efficient premium chip Qualcomm has produced. Qualcomm has also incorporated security elements directly into the SOC with a “Secure Processing Unit” allowing the Snapdragon 888 to provide on device cryptographic security.
For those wanting the best most powerful chip in their device you’re going to want your 2021 Flagship devices to be using the Snapdragon 888, with Qualcomm being the only real game in town for genuinely powerful mobile SOCs. We’re glad to see that Qualcomm isn’t just resting on their laurels, now we’re excited to see what they can do with the 700 and 600 series SOCs.
Devices with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 will start shipping early next year with 14 vendors already signed on for the chip including ASUS, Black Shark, Lenovo, LG, Meizu, Motorola, Nubia, realme, OnePlus, OPPO, Sharp, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE. Interestingly Google and Samsung are missing from this initial list.
