Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G 5G vs Qualcomm QCM6490

Qualcomm Snapdragon 855

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform is a high-end smartphone and tablet SoC that Qualcomm announced in December 2018. The SoC integrates a fast ‘Prime Core’ that clocks up to 2.84 GHz and three further fast ARM Cortex-A76 performance cores, which can reach up to 2.42 GHz. These are complemented by four power-saving ARM Cortex-A55 cores that clock up to a maximum of 1.8 GHz. The higher ‘Prime Core’ clock speed should provide significantly better single core performance than the Snapdragon 845, but we suspect that the Snapdragon 855 will fall short of the Apple A12 Bionic. The new SoC should have up to 45% faster single-core performance and 35% multi-core performance than its predecessor. Qualcomm praises the Snapdragon 855’s ability to maintain its performance when faced with sustained load, beating the Apple A12 Bionic SoC and the HiSilicon Kirin 980.

The SoC also integrates the new X24 LTE modem that Qualcomm promises will deliver up to 2 Gbit/s maximum download speed over LTE Cat.20 and up to 316 Mbit/s upload speeds. The Snapdragon 855 can be configured with the company’s new X50 5G modem too.

Qualcomm has also improved the integrated Wi-Fi modem, which is Wi-Fi 6-ready, has 8x8 Sounding and supports up to 802.11 ay Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi modem can utilise the 60 GHz mmWave band for up to 10 Gbit/s internet speeds.

The Hexagon 690 DSP has undergone the most revisions of that which Qualcomm has integrated into the Snapdragon 855. The new DSP incorporates a neural processing unit (NPU) with dedicated Tensor-cores that can execute up to 7 trillion operations per second in conjunction with the CPU and GPU. In short, the Snapdragon 855 should be three times faster than the Snapdragon 845 and two times faster than the Kirin 980 SoC.

The Snapdragon 855 also has a Spectra 380 ISP onboard, which is the world’s first chip to incorporate a Computer Vision Engine (CV-ISP) that can perform depth calculations in videos at up to 60 FPS. The Snapdragon 855 should deliver real-time portrait modes or be able to detect objects with relatively low power consumption.

The built-in memory controller supports up to 16 GB LPDDR4x RAM (4 x 16-bit). Moreover, the Adreno 640 has 50% more compute units (ALUs) than the Adreno 630, while Qualcomm claims that it should be 20% faster than its predecessor. We currently do not know what clock speeds the Adreno 640 will operate at as Qualcomm did not announce these during the announcement of the Snapdragon 855.

Qualcomm will manufacturer the Snapdragon 855 at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) using a 7 nm FinFET process. The switch to 7 nm manufacturing should make the SD855 20% more efficient than the SD845. Qualcomm has not officially announced the thermal design power (TDP) of the SD855, but we suspect that the SoC will reach a maximum of 5 W and will average around 3.5 W under load.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G 5G

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G 5G (SDM778G 5G Mobile Platform) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. It integrates eight cores (octa-core) divided into two clusters. A fast performance cluster with four cores based on the ARM Cortex-A78 architecture with up to 2.4 GHz and a power efficiency cluster with four small ARM Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.8 GHz. Depending on the workload only single clusters or all cores can run at different clock speeds.

Thanks to the new Cortex-A78 cores, the CPU performance increases by up to 40% compared to the old Snapdragon 768G according to Qualcomm. In our benchmarks, the 778G is able to reach the performance of the old high end chip Kirin 990. 

The integrated X53 5G modem supports up to 3.3 Gbps with sub 6Ghz. The FastConnect 6900 Wi-Fi modem supports the current Wi-Fi 6e standard with 6GHz.

The integrated Qualcomm Adreno 642L offers a 40% higher performance compared to the old Adreno 620 in the predecessor. This is partly thanks to the fast memory controller with LPDDR5-3200 support.

The integrated 6th gen AI engine called Hexagon 770 offers a 2x improvement and up to 12 TOPS of performance. The Spectra 570 ISP (image signal processor) supports up to three cameras. The satellite system supports all major standards like Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS and GPS.

The G specifies an optimized SoC for gaming and e.g. Qualcomm offers updates for the graphics driver.

The Snapdragon 778G is manufactured in the modern 6 nm process at TSMC (vs the 5LPE of the 780G).

Qualcomm QCM6490

The Qualcomm QCM6490 is an upper mid-range SoC and is based on the Snapdragon 778G, but this variant is an extended-life chipset. The QCM6490 is being used for the first time in the Android smartphone Fairphone 5, but has actually been designed for corporate use and IoT applications.

The Kyro 670 CPU consists of a total of eight cores, which are divided into three clusters. The first cluster consists of just one high-performance core (Kyro Gold Plus, Cortex-A78), which operates at up to 2.71 GHz. The second cluster contains three further Cortex-A78 cores (Kyro Gold), each clocking at up to 2.40 GHz. The remaining four power-saving cores (Kyro Silver, Cortex-A55) are located in the last cluster and operate at up to 1.96 GHz. For the graphics calculations, an Adreno 643 with 812 MHz is integrated.

The QCM6490 SoC has an integrated 5G modem that supports both 5G-Sub6 and 5G-mmWave. In theory, this enables data rates of up to 3.7 Gbit/s downlink and 2.5 Gbit/s upload. Wi-Fi 6E is also on board, which supports the 6 GHz band.

The SoC is manufactured using the 6 nm process.