Qualcomm reveals details about Snapdragon 855 soc

Qualcomm has revealed the details of its Snapdragon 855 soc. According to the chip designer, the new soc is able to achieve high 4g speeds thanks to the X24 modem. Furthermore, the performance in the field of gaming and AI has improved considerably, the company claims.

Qualcomm lets Samsung make the recently unveiled Snapdragon 855 on a 7nm process, according to the American processor designer. The company calls the processor cores Kryo 485 and these should enable up to 45 percent better performance compared to the predecessor Snapdragon 845 unveiled in December last year. As with the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm uses DynamIQ instead of big.Little.

It is a 64-bit configuration with a so-called prime core that runs at 2.84 GHz, supplemented with three cores with clock speeds of 2.42 GHz. These cores are all derived from ARM’s new Cortex A76. There are also four energy-efficient ARM Cortex A55 cores with a clock speed of 1.8GHz.

The processor cores share 2MB of L3 cache, which is only possible with DynamIQ. This is unchanged from the predecessor and differs from the 4MB implementation of Huawei’s Kirin 980.

The Adreno 640 GPU would bring a 20 percent improvement in performance. According to Qualcomm, this GPU makes the Snapdragon 855 a lot more suitable for games by enabling higher performance. According to the company, mobile gaming is still on the rise and it wants to respond to that with the GPU. For video playback, there is support for the h265 and vp9 codecs, which should also lead to lower power consumption.

The chip should enable HDR gaming, including support for 10bit colors, the rec2020 color space, Dolby Vision and HDR10+. This would make it the first soc to make this possible. In the context of the Snapdragon Elite Gaming Experience, there is also support for Vulkan 1.1. The American company reports that the Adreno 640 is able to support devices with screens that go up to 120 frames per second. The chip also makes it possible to enable 8k resolutions and 360-degree images for VR.

In the field of artificial intelligence, the Snapdragon 855 delivers significant improvements, Qualcomm claims, including the Hexagon 690 processor specifically intended for AI tasks. The Kryo cores and the Adreno GPU are able to work together with the Hexagon chip to perform AI tasks. All this should lead to a performance increase by a factor of three compared to the Snapdragon 845.

For connectivity, the new soc features the X24 modem, which enables speeds of up to 2Gbit/s for 4G networks, including support for 4×4 mimo and carrier aggregation at 7x20MHz. The Snapdragon 855 offers much higher speeds than its predecessor, which has an X20 modem and did not go beyond 1.2Gbit/s. The X50 for 5g connections is not integrated in the new soc, but there is support for this modem. There is also support for the 802.11ax WiFi standard and mmwave WiFi via Qualcomm’s 60GHz platform.

The Snapdragon 855 includes a Spectra 380 image signal processor, presented by Qualcomm as the world’s first computer vision isp. Not only would this be more economical, but it should also allow classifying objects in real time at 4k resolutions at 60fps.

The first smartphones that will receive the Snapdragon 855 will appear in a few months. OnePlus CEO Peter Lau has confirmed to Engadget that next year’s OnePlus flagship smartphone will feature the Snapdragon 855. In partnership with British carrier EE, the new OnePlus phone would also become the first 5G phone in Europe.