After introducing the Snapdragon 855 yesterday, Qualcomm has finally revealed more details of their new mobile platform. This is the successor of the current Snapdragon 845 and it will be powering the next range of flagship smartphones for 2019.
The Snapdragon 855 is manufactured based on a 7nm process and it utilises eight Kryo 485 CPU cores that are configured differently from its predecessors. It has a single Prime core clocked at 2.84GHz followed by three other performance cores clocked at 2.42GHz. For efficiency, there are another 4 cores that are clocked at 1.80GHz.
The first four performance cores are based on ARM’s Cortex-A76 while the second set cores for power efficiency are based on Cortex-A55. According to Qualcomm, this provides a 45% increase of performance compared to the current Snapdragon 845.
During the keynote, Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon 855 is the fastest 7nm based processor in the market and it offers faster loading times for popular apps. The comparison table didn’t provide any metrics but it can be assumed that the other two competitors are Apple A12 and Huawei’s Kirin 980.
In the graphics department, it features a next-gen Adreno 640 GPU that claims to provide 20% better graphics performance than its predecessor. AI performance is also getting a boost with up to 3X compared to the Snapdragon 845 and Qualcomm says that they offer twice the performance of other competing solutions.
The Snapdragon 855 platform is also the first to come with a Computer Vision ISP which enable devices to record 4K HDR videos with Portrait Mode. In terms of connectivity, the Snapdragon X24 modem offers even faster LTE Cat20 download speeds of up to 2Gbps with 7x Carrier Aggregation. For even faster mobile connectivity, Qualcomm is also enabling gigabit 5G connectivity with its X50 5G modem.
The new platform is also WiFi 6 ready and it supports 60 GHz WiFi that can deliver up to 10Gbps transfer speeds on 802.11ay. You can expect this new SoC to be available on flagship smartphones launching early next year.
Samsung has announced that they will be the first to offer a Snapdragon 855 powered 5G smartphone in the US while OnePlus will be the first to do so in Europe.
