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.
