Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 855 soc for high-end smartphones
Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 855 at its own event in Hawaii. This high-end soc, codenamed Snapdragon 8150 only internally, will appear in several high-end smartphones that use 5g.
Qualcomm will probably not announce all specifications until Thursday. Alex Katouzian, the director of Qualcomm’s mobile division, already showed the Snapdragon 855 and reported that the soc is made on a 7nm process and is compatible with the non-standard integrated Snapdragon X50 modem. The modem means that smartphones with the soc, which will appear from next year, are ready to use 5g networks. According to Katouzian, the Snapdragon 855 will enable “multi-gigabit speeds” when using a 5G network.
According to the Qualcomm CEO, the Snapdragon 855 will deliver up to three times the performance in artificial intelligence compared to previous mobile socs. Furthermore, according to Katouzian, the Snapdragon 855 is the world’s first soc to have an image signal processor with computer vision features, which should contribute to even more and better video and photo capabilities. Furthermore, Snapdragon Elite Gaming was unveiled, which represents a number of features of the soc that should improve the mobile gaming performance.
Qualcomm also announced the 3D Sonic Sensor. This is a sensor that is placed behind the screen and makes a scan of the finger by means of ultrasound. According to the company, this technology is much more secure than the optical implementations already on the market at the moment, such as in the OnePlus 6T. Qualcomm announced the technology underlying the deployment of ultrasound in June, although there were several versions and no mention of the 3D Sonic Sensor at the time. This sensor will be provided to manufacturers this year, which means that fingerprint scanners using ultrasonic technology can be expected from next year.
The Snapdragon 855 will be the successor to the Snapdragon 845, which is now in many high-end smartphones. It is still unknown what the exact specifications of the new soc will be, but according to rumors, it is a three-cluster design, just like the Kirin 980 from Huawei and the recently introduced Samsung Exynos 9820. Winfuture recently reported that there are four power-saving cores running at 1.77 GHz, and three cores with clock speeds of 2.42 GHz. A core could also go up to 2.84GHz.