Key details about the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888's successor emerge online
Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 888+ SoC only recently made its first-ever Geekbench appearance. As always, it will offer incremental upgrades over its predecessor. The true Snapdragon 888 successor (tentatively called the Snapdragon 895) codenamed SM8450, is still shrouded by mystery. However, we now have a good idea about the chipset thanks to renowned leaker Evan Blass.
The SM8450 will be based on TSMC's 4nm process node. Weibo veteran Ice Universe also chimed in verifying said information. It will also be one of the first mobile SoC's to use the ARMv9 architecture announced earlier this year. The leak says that it will use a Kryo 780 CPU. It doesn't tell us a lot about the SM8450's core configuration, but we're probably looking at a prime Cortex-X2 core coupled with Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 clusters. The CPU is paired with an upgraded Adreno 730 GPU. Whether or not it will be able to take on AMD and Samsung's RDNA-based mobile GPU remains to be seen. A new Spectra 680 ISP is also included. We learned about Qualcomm's collaboration with Leica some time ago. Hence, it could ship with some never-before-seen features.
Other Qualcomm SM8450 features include an integrated X65 5G modem, support for quad-channel package-on-package DDR5 RAM, Aqstic audio codec and more. We can also see an upgraded NPU thrown in the mix for ML/AI-heavy tasks. If things go as per schedule, Qualcomm will likely unveil the SM8450 in late December. Previous release cycles have told us that high-end Qualcomm chips tend to make their debut alongside a Xiaomi smartphone, and we see no reason why it will be different this time around.
"SM8450 is Qualcomm's next-gen premium system-on-chip (SoC). It has an integrated Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF system. It is fabricated on a 4nm process." pic.twitter.com/u1GXMhOWBf
— Evan Blass (@evleaks) June 3, 2021