Today for the first day of Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm is announcing its usual yearly mini-refresh of its flagship Snapdragon SoC in the form of the new Snapdragon 888+. As in the previous few generations, right around the summer period, Qualcomm is taking advantage of the completed spring device cycle and shifting focus onto newer devices in the second half of the year with, and a new SoC that’s slightly boosts performance.
| Qualcomm Snapdragon Flagship SoCs 2021 | ||
| SoC |
Snapdragon 888+ |
Snapdragon 888 |
| CPU | 1x Cortex-X1 @ 2.995GHz 1x1024KB pL2 3x Cortex-A78 @ 2.42GHz 3x512KB pL2 4x Cortex-A55 @ 1.80GHz 4x128KB pL2 4MB sL3 |
1x Cortex-X1 @ 2.84GHz 1x1024KB pL2 3x Cortex-A78 @ 2.42GHz 3x512KB pL2 4x Cortex-A55 @ 1.80GHz 4x128KB pL2 4MB sL3 |
| GPU | Adreno 660 @ 840MHz | |
| DSP / NPU | Hexagon 780 32 TOPS AI (Total CPU+GPU+HVX+Tensor) |
Hexagon 780 26 TOPS AI (Total CPU+GPU+HVX+Tensor) |
| Memory Controller |
4x 16-bit CH @ 3200MHz LPDDR5 / 51.2GB/s 3MB system level cache |
|
| ISP/Camera | Triple 14-bit Spectra 580 ISP 1x 200MP or 84MP with ZSL or 64+25MP with ZSL or 3x 28MP with ZSL 4K video & 64MP burst capture |
|
| Encode/ Decode |
8K30 / 4K120 10-bit H.265 Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10, HLG 720p960 infinite recording |
|
| Integrated Modem | X60 integrated (LTE Category 24/22) DL = 2500 Mbps 7x20MHz CA, 1024-QAM UL = 316 Mbps 3x20MHz CA, 256-QAM (5G NR Sub-6 + mmWave) DL = 7500 Mbps UL = 3000 Mbps |
|
| Mfc. Process | Samsung 5nm (5LPE) |
The new Snapdragon 888+ is a speed bin of the Snapdragon 888 that we’ve seen earlier in the year. What’s changed in the new unit is that Qualcomm is upgrading the CPU frequencies from the original 2.84GHz to 2.995GHz – a 5.2% performance upgrade. It’s not too much of a major upgrade, and I’m curious to see how it plays out in terms of power consumption as the X1 cores in the 888 were already quite power hungry.
Besides the CPU uplift, the AI engine has also seen a combined performance uplift through frequency bumps as well as software optimisations that increases the AI throughput from 26 TOPS up to 32 TOPS. As a reminder, this is an aggregate figure across all of the SoC’s computational blocks of CPU, GPU, and DSP/NPU.
The one thing that’s not been upgraded this year is the GPU performance, which is a bit unusual for a “+” part as normally in the past few years we’ve also seen frequency increases on this SoC block. Generally, this can be explained through the fact that the Adreno 660 in the Snapdragon 888 is already running at extremely high frequencies and corresponding high-power draw, and most devices today are not able to sustain those peak performance states – further increasing frequencies would have little benefits.
ASUS, HONOR, Vivo and Xiaomi were partner vendors which endorsed the new Snapdragon 888+ and are working on devices featuring the chipset. We should be expecting the first Snapdragon 888+ devices to start being announced in the third quarter.