It seems that the year 2019 is going to be focused on 5G technology as far as the smartphone industry is concerned. Qualcomm, one of the leading mobile chipset manufacturer — aimed to be at the forefront of the 5G era, has unveiled its new flagship chipset — Snapdragon 855.
The chipset will be powering the high-end smartphone from the majority of the smartphone manufacturers around the globe for the next year, including Samsung, Xiaomi, LG, Sony, Vivo, Oppo, etc.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 is the first commercial mobile SoC compatible with multi-gigabit 5G networks, whenever they become available. The chipset is coupled with the company’s own the Snapdragon X50 5G modem and the X24 LTE modem.
The chipset also comes with a dedicated neural processing engine for carrying out AI-related tasks, catching up to the chipsets like Apple A12 Bionic and Kirin 980. Just like those two chipsets, this one too is manufactured using the 7nm process.
It comes with a total of eight cores, four of which are power-saving ones clocked at 1.78GHz, three performance cores clocked at 2.42GHz, and another special performance core that has a clock speed of 2.84GHz. It is coupled with the Adreno 640 GPU which has been optimized for resource-intensive tasks such as playing Augmented Reality games.
The chipset even comes with a separate processing unit for performing computational photography, similar to what we’ve seen on Google’s Pixel phones. The feature will offer advanced camera features through software. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 will be available starting next year on flagship phones from major smartphone manufacturers.
As we had expected, the Snapdragon 855 from Qualcomm focus on improving the core pillars of the user experience — performance, AI, camera, and connectivity with the advent of 5G. The company will be revealing more information about the Snapdragon 855 throughout the Snapdragon Tech Summit 2018.
