Qualcomm’s annual tech summit is underway this week in Hawaii, and the term that emerged from presenters’ mouths every two seconds there was “5G.”…
Qualcomm’s annual tech summit is underway this week in Hawaii, and the term that emerged from presenters’ mouths every two seconds there was “5G.” The next generation of mobile connectivity is set to arrive soon, and Qualcomm wants to ensure that designers of next-gen flagship phones choose its wares for that task—in this case, the Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform.
That “mobile platform” is actually composed of two chips: the brand-new, 7-nm Snapdragon 855 SoC and Qualcomm’s already-announced X50 5G modem. The Snapdragon 855 SoC is the star of the show here, so let’s talk about it. The CPU portion of the chip has eight next-gen Kryo 485 custom cores with a three-speed arrangement. One is a “prime” core ticking away at up to 2.84 GHz, bolstered by three “performance” cores at a max of 2.42 GHz and four high-efficiency units at up to 1.8 GHz.
Next in line, the company claims its Adreno 640 GPU should be 20% faster than the Adreno 630 before it. The company touts support for physically-based rendering (which isn’t anything special on its face but might be worthy of note for a mobile GPU) as well as 10-bit color depth, thereby enabling HDR10, HDR10+, HLG and Dolby Vision image formats. The Adreno 640 should also be capable of playing back 8K videos in 360-degree formats.
