Qualcomm today explained the details of its new flagship Snapdragon 888 chipset, the processor that’s going into most of next year’s top-of-the-line Android phones—including, we anticipate, the US and Canadian versions of the Samsung Galaxy S21 and the OnePlus 9.
Qualcomm dominates high-end Android smartphones in the US. While some US phones sport MediaTek processors, by and large the market here is split between Qualcomm on Android and Apple with its iPhone line.
Looking at the 888’s flagship features, Qualcomm is continuing with some of the themes it showed in previous years, but dropping a few. Camera and 5G capabilities continue to be key, and pushing those forward are Qualcomm priorities. The company has also ramped up its focus on mobile gaming in the past few years. Falling by the wayside, at least in Qualcomm’s initial information, are the company’s previous foci on virtual and augmented reality—perhaps a sign that those technologies haven’t taken off as quickly as expected.
So far, only one company has announced a Snapdragon 888 phone—Xiaomi, with the Mi 11. But more “are expected to be commercially available in the first quarter of 2021,” Qualcomm says. The company announced 14 manufacturer partners yesterday—Asus, Black Shark, Lenovo, LG, Meizu, Motorola, Nubia, realme, OnePlus, Oppo, Sharp, vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE.
Don’t overthink Samsung’s absence from that list. Samsung tends to do a balancing act with its flagship phones where some of them have Qualcomm chips and some have Samsung’s own Exynos chips, and sometimes it doesn’t play up the chipset manufacturer because it wants the two sets of phones to appear equal.
Three, Three, Three Cameras
Phones have a lot of cameras nowadays. But they can generally only use two at once, whether for hybrid zoom, portrait mode, or front-and-back dual recording. While LG has experimented with appearing to take three images at once, it really does them in quick sequence. The Spectra 580 ISP in the Snapdragon 888 can really take three pictures with different cameras, at once.
Okay, so why? Qualcomm says this will allow for smoother transitions between cameras, as all three cameras run at once. So as you zoom in and out, there’s no startup or switching time when you change lenses. You can also capture three 28-megapixel images or three 4K videos simultaneously, record them all (provided you have enough memory bandwidth) and choose between them or edit them later.
The triple ISP will work with new image sensors called “staggered HDR sensors,” which record three simultaneous videos to create one high-dynamic-range 4K frame, Qualcomm says. Both photos and videos can record in 10-bit color.
The image signal processor here is “much, much faster this year,” according to Qualcomm VP of Product Management Judd Heape. At 35% faster than last year’s unit, it now captures 2.7 gigapixels per second, and lets you capture 120 photos per second in burst mode, which will be good for sports and action photography, he says. Along with 120 frames-per-second video capture, which the Snapdragon 865 has, the 888 has 120fps 4K video playback, something phone manufacturers have been waiting for with their increased use of 120fps screens.
The Snapdragon 888 is the first major anti-deepfake camera, too, Qualcomm says. There’s a startup company called Truepic involving at least one Qualcomm alumnus that developed cryptographic technology to authenticate photos as being unaltered; it’s compatible with a joint Twitter-Adobe-New York Times initiative called the “Content Authenticity Initiative.” Although Truepic works on the Snapdragon 865, the 888 will be the first chipset to broadly promote the technology.
The new AI processor improves autofocus, auto exposure, and auto white balance, Heape says.
Boosting 5G
The Snapdragon 888 integrates the X60 modem into the chipset itself, marking a return to integrated modems after two years of Qualcomm making the 5G modem an external component. This may be made possible by the new 5nm manufacturing process, which makes everything smaller, thus giving you lower power usage and better battery life on 5G.
The X60 was announced earlier this year, and it’s the modem expected to be seen in Apple’s iPhone 13 series as well as next year’s flagship Android phones. Its critical feature is the ability to combine multiple, non-contiguous channels of 5G spectrum, whether they’re below or above 6GHz. This is going to, hopefully, end the era of 5G being slower than 4G on AT&T’s and Verizon’s national networks, because it will let the carriers combine 4G and 5G bands more freely. It’ll also boost the potential of AT&T and T-Mobile’s high-band millimeter-wave networks, because they’ll be able to be combined with other 5G bands, supplementing them rather than replacing them.
“The way to get capacity [with 5G] is really more spectrum,” Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon says. “What carriers have accumulated over many years with their spectrum holdings under the 6GHz band, it accounts for maybe one or two channels of 5G if you want the speed. I’m optimistic that we are going to see a lot more penetration of carrier aggregation within existing spectrum bands, as well as millimeter wave, as we go to 2021.”
The X60 will also use a new, slimmer QTM535 antenna module, which will allow for smaller 5G phones.
Speaking About AI …
I still find the AI engines in smartphone chipsets the hardest components to really understand because they are rarely used to execute entire applications. Rather, they enhance specific features of applications, like scene recognition or voice recognition.
Qualcomm’s new AI engine, the Hexagon 780, supposedly executes 26 trillion operations per second, as compared to the 11 TOPS in the Neural Engine of Apple’s M1 chipset. That’s 43% faster than last year, Qualcomm says. Along with a built-in sensing hub, that lets the 888 have sensors constantly on to detect a bunch of situations at extremely low power: phone pickup detection, activity recognition, audio event detection, and car crash detection, for instance.
Qualcomm showed off what Snapchat can do with a new software toolkit that uses its AI processor; it makes Snapchat lenses faster, more accurate, and more dynamic.
It also, as I said before, plays a big role in the camera—improving autofocus, color balance, and scene detection. And AI enables some nearly creepy photo creations, which make Qualcomm’s partnership with TruePic, the anti-deepfake people, even more relevant.
“You’ll be able to erase a character and put yourself inside a movie scene or a video that you recorded and interact with the other people/characters inside,” Qualcomm technology VP Jeff Gelhaar says in a blog post.
What About the CPU?
Qualcomm hasn’t foregrounded its CPU in several years now. The company has long said that’s because it’s focused on complex workloads that use many dedicated processors rather than just dumping a lot of work on the CPU. That’s all well and good for smartphones, but Qualcomm’s heterogeneous-computing approach doesn’t seem to pay off as well in laptops.
There’s new attention paid to Qualcomm’s Kryo CPUs now that Apple has showed excellent performance with its M1 ARM-based Mac line. PCs, typically, lean on their CPUs more than smartphones do, because of the ways their operating systems and applications are written. And although Qualcomm isn’t announcing a new PC chipset today, the Snapdragon 888’s Kryo 680 may play a role in Qualcomm’s next chipset for Windows PCs.
The Snapdragon 888 offers a 25% performance lift and is 25% more power efficient than the previous generation, Qualcomm says. The chipset has the first true three-cluster architecture in a Qualcomm processor. Previous Qualcomm chipsets have had one “prime core,” some “performance cores” and some “efficiency cores,” but the prime and performance cores were from the same design, they were just clocked differently.
The 888 has an ARM Cortex-X1 prime core clocked at 2.84GHz; three Cortex-A78 performance cores at 2.4GHz; and four Cortex-A55 efficiency cores at 1.8GHz. If Qualcomm follows the practice of past years, later it will release an overclocked “888+” with the prime core clocked around 3GHz.
Apple’s M1 chipset uses its own core design, with four performance “Firestorm” cores clocked at up to 3.2GHz and four efficiency “Icestorm” cores clocked at up to 2GHz.
At least on the cross-platform benchmark Geekbench, the M1 is so far ahead of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ that Qualcomm will have to work very hard to catch up competitively with a laptop chipset. The Geekbench 5 browser shows the M1 to get around 1725 single-core, 7550 multi-core, while in our own tests of the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, we got 973 single-core, 3249 multi-core. A 25% performance lift would not pull the 865+ up to the M1’s standard.
Other 888 Features
The 888 updates a bunch of other features to current standards.
Next year’s phones will have 4K screens at up to 60fps and quad-HD screens at up to 144fps. They’ll support up to 16GB of RAM. “144 hertz is a big deal for a lot of the OEMs,” says Qualcomm mobile SVP Alex Katouzian.
Qualcomm’s FastConnect 6900 Wi-Fi system includes the new Wi-Fi 6E 6GHz frequencies, which aren’t available on any routers yet but will accelerate Wi-Fi speeds when they are. With a maximum speed of 3.6Gbps, Wi-Fi 6E goes hand in hand with millimeter-wave 5G; it will be needed with home 5G installations to properly distribute their gig-plus speeds throughout a home, for instance.
Bluetooth has been boosted to version 5.2, with dual antennas and AptX Voice for high-quality Bluetooth voice calling. A new voice assistant accelerator speeds up signal processing for voice commands, voice assistants, and voice calls.
The 888 also has a security feature that’s useful well beyond security: a hypervisor mode. According to Qualcomm, hypervisor lets the 888 run multiple instances of isolated operating systems at the same time, on the same device.
There are a lot of ways to use this. Work and personal profiles could easily have segregated data. Crash-prone applications could run in their own OS sandboxes, so they don’t crash the rest of the system. And devices could much more easily run multiple OSes—letting Snapdragon-based tablets run both Windows and Android simultaneously.
Coming Soon to a Phone Near You
Qualcomm’s 888 has a lot of potential for new phone features. The triple-camera support looks very interesting, and as a radio geek, I’m looking forward to seeing how the X60 modem improves performance on all the North American wireless carriers.
There are five major players in global smartphone chipsets, but only three that matter in North America: Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek. (Samsung and Huawei don’t make a lot of chips for devices here.) At the top of the line, Apple is Qualcomm’s major competitor, and the 888 doesn’t change the game in that competition. Apple uses Qualcomm’s modems, and while its A14 chipset doesn’t have the 888’s AI or triple-camera chops, its CPU performance will likely still be better than the 888’s. (We’ll have to see when final benchmarks come out.)
That raises my top concern about the 888: what’s happening with Qualcomm in laptops. The 888 is a smartphone chipset, not the successor to Qualcomm’s 8c and 8cx laptop chipsets. But with Apple’s M1-based MacBook Air and MacBook Pro getting glowing reviews for their consolidated approach to chips, laptop manufacturing, OS and application software, Qualcomm and Microsoft really need to show a better response for the struggling ARM-based Windows laptop world.
