Qualcomm is hosting its Snapdragon Technology Summit this week, where the chip maker unveiled its flagship mobile platform for 2018 – the Snapdragon 845. It is now in sampling with the company’s customers including the smartphone makers and will be arriving in the actual devices in early-2018. Xiaomi has already confirmed that it is using the 845 in its next flagship.
According to Qualcomm, the CPU and GPU in the Snapdragon 845 have been reworked from ground-up and offer significant performance improvements over the Snapdragon 835.
“As leaders in mobile technology, we will transform the mobile experience with comprehensive advancements in visual processing, AI, security and connectivity. The Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform is the next horizon of innovation and is going to transform the way people use their mobile devices to make their lives better,” said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager, mobile, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc, in a statement.
Here are the highlights of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845
- Based on 2nd-gen 10nm process
- Includes eight Kryo 385 CPU cores (four high-power and four low-power) and Adreno 630 GPU
- Each CPU core has a private L2 cache and there is an added L3 cache with 2MB memory
- The high-power cores can be clocked upto 2.8GHz and the low-power can be clocked upto 1.8GHz
- The high-power cores will provide 25-30% better performance than the cores on Snapdragon 835, the low-power cores will offer 15% better performance.
- Adreno 630 will offer 30% faster graphics performance
- Overall Snapdragon 845 is 30% more power-efficient than Snapdragon 835
- Apart from the CPU cores and GPU, there is Spectra 280 image signal processor (ISP), Hexagon 685 DSP, X20 LTE modem and a secure processing unit.
- The Spectra 280 makes sure the Snapdragon 845 can capture and play 4K HDR video at 60fps, support HDR 10, slow motion video capture 720p@480fps, upto 32MP cameras, and a lot more
- Quickcharge 4/ 4+ support, which claims to offer 5 hours of battery life from 5 minutes of charging
- Bluetooth 5 support
- 3x improvement in overall AI performance
You can read more about Snapdragon 845 at the company website
Since there is pretty much no other premium smartphone chipmaker (except probably Samsung, whose chips are mostly used in its own devices), you can expect to see the Snapdragon 845 is the flagship and premium devices from all Android partners like LG, Sony, Asus, Xiaomi, Google, HTC, ZTE, and Samsung.
