Qualcomm unveiled its latest flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 888 5G, at its virtual Snapdragon Tech Summit just yesterday. The chipmakers shared a few highlights and advancements that Snapdragon 888 5G brings in tow, however it did not dive deeper into the details. Today, Qualcomm has opened up and shared everything there is to know concerning the Snapdragon 888 in detail.
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Snapdragon 888 5G: What You Need to Know
Snapdragon 888 5G is an octa-core chipset based mostly on the 5nm process node. The chipset marches forward with the identical 1+3+4 architecture as its predecessor, Snapdragon 865. It is, however, important to note that the Kryo 680 CPU now additionally features a new Cortex-X1 core apart from the usual ARM Cortex-A series cores.
Snapdragon 888 5G chipset contains 4 high-efficiency Cortex-A55 cores clocked at as much as 1.8GHz, three high-performance Cortex-A78 cores clocked at as much as 2.4GHz, and one high performance Cortex-X1 core clocked at as much as 2.84GHz. Qualcomm boasts that Kryo 680 will ship up to a 25% improvement in overall CPU performance.
Unlike last year’s Snapdragon 865 where phone makers needed to include a separate 5G modem alongside the chipset, Qualcomm has built-in the Snapdragon X60 modem aboard the Snapdragon 888 chipset.
The Snapdragon X60 5G modem helps both sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G networks and can deliver speeds as much as 7.5Gbps. The modem additionally helps global 5G multi-SIM, Dynamic Spectrum Sharing, carrier aggregation, and more.
Also, the Snapdragon 888 comes equipped with the Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 Mobile Connectivity System that was announced fairly recently. It supports Wi-Fi 6 (offering as much as 3.6Gbps speeds), new Wi-Fi 6E (6GHz), and Bluetooth 5.2 to deliver a crisp and dependable audio experience.
The Kryo 680 CPU cores are backed by the new Adreno 660 GPU, which Qualcomm says “achieves its biggest performance leap yet, delivering up to 35% faster graphics rendering” compared to the previous-gen Snapdragon 865.
Building upon features like HDR gaming, 144FPS support, and updatable GPU drivers from the last year, Snapdragon 888 5G brings impressive new gaming features. It supports variable-rate shading, a feature that was earlier restricted to PC games and consoles. It improves the rendering speeds by as much as 30%, says Qualcomm and that’s just insane. This essentially means games ought to be able to run at higher frame rates for an extended period of time.
Other gaming improvements include a new Quick Touch feature and Anti-howl. While the former shall be helpful in FPS games like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty, providing you a 20% faster touch response, the latter will make sure you don’t get audio feedback (shrill sound) when playing multiplayer games on speaker in the same room.
In its official press note, Qualcomm boasts that Snapdragon 888 SoC will “transform mobile devices into professional-quality cameras.” The chipset comes equipped with a new Spectra 580 ISP. The greatest upgrade this time around is a triple Triple Image Signal Processor (ISP), which suggests it is possible for you to capture 4K HDR videos from three cameras at the same time.
The Spectra 580 ISP allows “users to capture photos and videos at 2.7 gigapixels per second or roughly 120 photos at 12MP resolution,” as revealed yesterday. It supports as much as 200MP images, 10-bit colour depth, slo-mo at 960FPS, Dolby Vision video recording, multi-frame noise reduction, and a lot more.
Snapdragon 888 phones will also allow you to capture burst images in 120fps to make it easier so that you can click moving objects. The spotlight will, however, have to be the new low light architecture that may apparently capture (bright) photos in as little as 0.1 lux lighting (close to darkness).
Snapdragon 888 chipset also comes outfitted with a 6th-Gen Qualcomm AI Engine, together with the new Hexagon 780 processor. The fused AI-accelerator structure here helps provide an astounding 26 TOPS (tera operations per second) performance.
Apart from the usual security measures equivalent to Qualcomm Secure Processing Unit, Trusted Execution Environment, and cloud-based Wireless Edge Service, Snapdragon 888 5G brings two impressive features in tow.
First up, Snapdragon 888 supports Hypervisor, enabling the chipset to run multiple working programs and keep their data isolated from one another. This means if in case you have personal, work, and other profiles – each with their very own data, then you may instantly swap between them and they’ll stay completely separate from one another. This is nice for security and privacy.
Also, Snapdragon 888 is “the world’s first camera compliant with the Content Authenticity Initiative”. This has been made possible by a collaboration with the main photo and video verification platform, Truepic. Phones backed by this chipset can capture cryptographically-signed photos. This means you will be able to “ensure the validity and security of images before you share, purchase, or utilize.”
Snapdragon 888 5G: Lucky Charm for 2021 Android Phones
So yeah, Snapdragon 888 5G chipset actually brings along some impressive gaming and camera features and we can’t wait to get our arms on smartphones powered by this chipset. Will Snapdragon 888 5G show to be a lucky charm for 2021 Android phones and assist them tackle Apple’s A14 Bionic chipset? We must wait and watch.
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