Last week, Qualcomm revealed the Snapdragon 888 Plus – an overclocked version of the Snapdragon 888 with a new AI Engine. The chip’s true successor, which will supposedly be called the Snapdragon 895, will be announced later this year and per a new leak, it will be manufactured on a slightly more advanced node.
The Snapdragon 888 is apparently based on Samsung’s 5nm process and a recent report had claimed that Qualcomm’s next premium SoC will use a 4nm process node. Leaker Ice Universe has corroborated that and he adds that the chip will be manufactured using Samsung’s 4nm fabrication technology.
Samsung’s 4LPE/LPP (4nm) node is an iterative improvement of the company’s 5LPE (5nm) tech and we don’t know much about it, except that it will provide improved performance and smaller cell size.
The Snapdragon 895 is reportedly internally known as the SM8450 and it is expected to come with Qualcomm’s new X65 5G modem, which seemingly has also been built on Samsung’s 4nm mode. The silicon, which will power next year’s best Android phones, is also rumored to feature CPU cores based on Arm’s new designs and the Adreno 730 GPU.
Since midyear refreshes have become something of a tradition for Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 895 will presumably be followed by a Plus version and Ice says it will be based on TSMC’s 4nm process. This tech will probably also be used for next year’s iPhone lineup.
To give you a perspective, the A15 Bionic that is likely to power 2021’s iPhones will employ TSMC’s N5P process, which is a performance-enhanced version of the foundry’s 5nm process that boosts performance by up to 5 percent or decrease power consumption by up to 10 percent.
N4 (4nm) will be a further evolution of N5 and it will enable a 6 percent smaller die area. This should result in further performance and power consumption improvements.
Qualcomm is presumably sticking to Samsung for the moment as TSMC is all booked up.
