Computex 2018 | Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 850 for Windows PCs

The Snapdragon 850 is built with the "2nd Generation" of 10 nm and Qualcomm was not tired to mention that Intel is still on 14 nm and has troubles bringing 10 nm to the market. The Snapdragon 850 is not pin compatible to the the older Snapdragon 835 and offers improved performance (+30% according to Qualcomm, Kyro 385 CPU cores at up to 2.95 GHz), better battery life (+20%) and with 1.2 GBit also 20% faster LTE speeds. Furthermore, due to better compability and certification, now 90% of all carriers can use Gigabit LTE on the Snapdragon 850 X20 modem (compared to 64% of all carriers with the X16 in the Snapdragon 835). Compared to the Snapdragon 845 in smartphones, the 850 has the same silicon but running at higher frequencies / power consumption.

Futhermore, Qualcomm mentioned that the Snapdragon 850 integrates an AI engine that can be leveraged by third party developers.

As a new partner, a Samsung representative came on stage and also mentioned that they will bring a device to market later this year. More details of images were not provided. The existing partners like Asus, Lenovo and HP are expected to upgrade their devices to the Snapdragon 850, but nothing detailed was announced. Qualcomm only showed their big and clunky reference tablet running simple Windows app store games like Asphalt 9.

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