Snapdragon 888 Brings Along Performance Gains: 5nm Process, Integrated 5G Model, Better AI and Image Processing

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips have made their mark on the industry. Right now, most leading devices on the market are supporting these chipsets. Not to mention, aside from Apple’s in-house SoCs, these are the benchmark for performance in mobile devices. The last set of Snapdragon 865 processors were quite powerful chips. Now, Qualcomm introduced its latest SoC: The Snapdragon 888. The company decided to skip the 875 since 8 is considered a lucky number and they wanted to go all out here.
In this tweet from Ishan Agarwal, we get to know more about what the chip may have to offer.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Chipset:
-5nm process
-Fully integrated w/ X60 5G modem, supports both mmWave & sub-6 5G bands
-6th Gen AI Engine (26 tera operations per second)
-35% Faster ISP, (120 12-megapixel photos per second
-3rd Gen Elite GamingMore later. #SnapdragonSummit pic.twitter.com/teQRW4P3Nm
— Ishan Agarwal (@ishanagarwal24) December 1, 2020
Now, it truly feels like we have entered the future with the chips we see today. First Apple launched the world’s first 5nm process chipset and now we see Qualcomm push one too. It is nice to see we are pushing the limits of technology with these new chipsets.
The Snapdragon 888 Chipset
Like the previous version, this too would come with a fully integrated 5G modem. This would seriously help cellphone manufacturers to integrate this into their phone bodies. Not to mention, the power draw would be considerably less. This modem would support both mmWave and sub-6 5G bands.
There has been focus put on AI applications with the new 6th generation AI engine. This would give out 26 tera operations per second. It is hard to translate this performance gain into numbers but with more AI applications that we see today, it would surely benefit the users in the long term. It is nice to see that the megapixel race is slowly dying down and it is the image processing that is favoured. Google and Apple have favoured these for a long time now. The SD888 would feature a new image processor which would be 35% faster than the older one. This would mean that it can churn through about 120, 12MP photos every second. Lastly, there would be better gaming performance as well but that was to be expected with the claimed power gains every new generation brings along with it.