Qualcomm has officially unveiled its latest high-end flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 888 (originally presumed to be called the 875), during this year’s Snapdragon Tech Summit. The new SoC is confirmed to be powering the next wave of Android flagship smartphones from Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi and others in 2021.
The Snapdragon 888 is the first chipset from the company to fully integrate a 5G modem onto the chip itself. Onboard is Qualcomm’s own X60 modem which relies on a 5nm process for improved power efficiency and 5G carrier aggregation across the mmWave and sub-6GHz bands of the spectrum.
The company also revealed the new flagship chipset to feature its sixth-gen AI engine via a tweaked version of the Qualcomm Hexagon processor. This enables for major performance improvements and efficiency for AI-related tasks. Qualcomm teases that the onboard Adreno GPU will feature the “most significant upgrade” in terms of performance, although specifics on that have yet to be announced.
As for mobile photography, the company says that the Snapdragon 888 will enable the ability to shoot approximately 120 images per second at 12MP resolution. It added that such capability is made possible thanks to the updated Image Signal Processor (ISP) that is built onto the chipset. Qualcomm did not reveal any details regarding other image capture advancements or video recording capabilities at this time.
A more detailed look of the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SoC is expected to be presented by the company on the second day of its Snapdragon Tech Summit on 2 December 2020 (US time). We’ll definitely keep you posted on the latest information regarding the next generation of Android flagship chipset once the time arrives.
(Source: Qualcomm [Press announcement])
