On day two of its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit, Qualcomm went into great detail about what makes its new Snapdragon 888 alluring. The new SoC offers huge performance improvements, as well as a fleet of new features…
On day two of its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit, Qualcomm went into great detail about what makes its new Snapdragon 888 alluring. The new SoC offers huge performance improvements, as well as a fleet of new features from camera to gaming to bite into. As anticipated, Qualcomm spent most of day two at its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit talking about the new Snapdragon 888 SoC and its plethora of features. We were provided pretty much all of the information we would have wanted, and only now wait to see what the devices do in the real-world once they actually hit the market. Qualcomm opened its day two festivities to say that it’s all about creating “the premium experiences people deserve”, and with the Snapdragon 888, the company isn’t just doubling-down, but tripling-down on some features. Those boosts hit the camera, gaming, and of course, AI. An overarching theme of the day is that Qualcomm is on the path to deliver a mobile SoC that can allow people to use their smartphones for tasks that have only been traditionally relied-upon with high-end hardware – eg: smart TVs or DSLR cameras. Yesterday, Qualcomm talked about a wildlife photographer that recently shot a documentary on a smartphone, and given the versatility and also the capabilities we’re moving towards, we’re sure that’s going to be a more common story going forward. Few people have 8K displays today, but many future phones will be ready to let us record at that resolution. Snapdragon 888 introduces a new Triple ISP design, which iterates on the first Spectra Dual ISP design which debuted five years ago. This new design allows for concurrent capture from three lenses, and also process all three at once. The full capabilities would allow simultaneous 4K capture from three sources – including HDR – or three 28 megapixel photos. Thanks to these upgrades to Spectra 580, up to 2.7 gigapixels can be captured at once, with support up to 84 megapixel sources at 30 FPS. Also notable is the shift from 8-bit JPEG to 10-bit HEIF, and also the ability to record at 4K/120. That latter feature will become all the more useful going forward as 120Hz screens become more common. Also new with this Spectra ISP is the ability to let the camera automatically shift between lenses, based on your actions on the screen – rather than force you to choose which camera you want while trying to snap a photo quickly. Being touted also is the fact that the ISP can be useful at capturing images in “near darkness”, with as low as 0.1 illuminance (lux). There can’t be a new Snapdragon release without the talk of gaming, and there was a lot of it at the second day of the Tech Summit. As we covered yesterday, Qualcomm and its partners are well aware that high-FPS gaming is worth going after, so we’re hearing a lot about 120 FPS capabilities, something clearly bolstered by mobile esports. As part of the new Adreno 660 GPU, variable rate shading support has been added, effectively porting a popular feature from desktop (and new console) gaming over to mobile. With it, parts of a scene that won’t benefit much from high-fidelity will be reduced, improving performance up to 30%.
