It's the second, and last day of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit event that was held in the ether, with more details of the chipmaker's new Snapdragon 888 processor being unveiled. Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon 888 benefits sizeable upticks in performance in areas such as GPU, 5G connectivity, photography, and AI, using new Cortex cores to achieve significant gains over the Snapdragon 865.
With Xiaomi, OPPO, and Realme having already announced their intentions to be among the first brands to launch Snapdragon 888-powered flagships, you can bet that Qualcomm's latest silicon will be the hottest chip of 2021.
If numbers and specs are your jam, we've embedded the full list above of what the Snapdragon 888 is bringing to the smartphone world.
As you might expect, gaming is an important part of the Snapdragon 888 chip, which is equipped with Qualcomm's Elite Gaming function that is said to bring ultra-smooth gameplay at the highest HDR graphics at desktop-level. Variable Rate Shading makes its mobile debut, improving game rending by up to 30%. The Game Quick Touch feature increases responsiveness by up to 20%, lowering touch latency.
How are all of these performance boosts possible? Well, the Snapdragon 888 features a re-jigged architecture, and while it's still an octa-core processor, the Kryo 680 boasts a ‘supercore' that is ably assisted by 3 medium-performance cores, and 4 lower-performance cores. It's the first consumer CPU subsystem that is based on the ARM Cortex-X1, and features the Adreno 660 GPU that delivers up to 35% faster graphics rending than the previous generation.
In a nutshell, you can expect a general 35% performance boost with a 20% increased power efficiency over the Snapdragon 865 chipset. Rather than just increasing clock speed or throwing more cores into the mix, Qualcomm seems to have taken a holistic approach to the Snapdragon 888, improving it in just about every single department. We don't have too long to wait for the first Snapdragon 888-powered flagships to launch (early 2021), and I can't wait to get my hands on one.
