Qualcomm teases its latest Snapdragon 855 chipset with 5G built-in and enhanced computer vision ISP
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 has been unveiled revealed and it’s set to be the first mobile chipset to bring 5G to smartphones. Unveiled at the company’s third Tech Summit in Hawaii, the new processor will come to smartphones next year with Samsung confirming it will be among the first wave of devices to be released in 2019.
Qualcomm also showed off, for the first time, a fully-fledged reference smartphone containing the new 5G chip technology. So far we’ve only seen circuit boards or bulky angular test devices. Even Qualcomm’s own development devices haven’t really resembled a proper smartphone so far, so this represents a significant step forward in the move towards 5G.
Snapdragon 855 release date and key features
The first phones with the Snapdragon 855 inside will almost certainly be announced in February at MWC, with the first phones available from around March 2019. The key feature that Snapdragon 855 will bring, of course, will be 5G integration. As usual, though, Qualcomm will also be boosting performance and adding features across the board.
Qualcomm is currently drip-feeding us details about the Snapdragon 855 and hasn’t unveiled full details just yet but it has given us a teaser of the chip’s major new features.
Chief among these is its new, fourth-generation “AI Engine”. This brings a “3X” performance improvement over the third-generation tech inside the 845 and it’s also twice as fast as its “7nm” rivals, by which Qualcomm presumably means the Kirin 980 (Huawei Mate 20 Pro) and the A12 Bionic (Apple iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR).
What this actually means in terms of the overall performance of Snapdragon 855-powered phones is hard to tell as yet but, presumably, we’ll see a boost to AI-driven features such as on-phone face recognition and battery management. We’ll be bringing you further details when they are fully announced tomorrow.
Qualcomm is adding AI features directly into its camera ISP, a feature it’s calling “computer vision”. Essentially, this looks to be similar to the AI camera features seen in phones such as the Huawei P20 Pro and the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, where the camera is able to identify people, objects and scene types, then adjust settings appropriately.
Finally, the Snapdragon 855 looks set to introduce a collection of improvements aimed at mobile gamers, under the umbrella term “Snapdragon Elite Gaming” and it also took the opportunity to announce a rebrand of its ultra-sonic under-screen fingerprint sensor, now dubbed “Qualcomm 3D Sonic Sensor”. This, it says, allows you to unlock your phone even with wet or greasy fingers.
What phones will get the Snapdragon 855 and when will they launch?
No concrete details have yet been revealed about the smartphones that will get the Snapdragon 855, but you can expect adoption to follow a similar pattern to previous years.
That means you should expect most of the big name flagships in 2019 to feature the new chipset: the OnePlus 7, the Sony Xperia XZ4 and the LG G8 among many others, including an army of reasonably priced Xiaomi phones.
Smartphone customers in the US will likely see the new Snapdragon chip inside the new Samsung Galaxy S10 and Samsung Galaxy Note 10, too, although European users, as usual, will more likely see those models using Samsung’s own Exynos variant. We expect this to be the Samsung Exynos 9820 chip, a chipset built using an 8nm fabrication process, which was announced last month on the 14th of November.
How fast will the Snapdragon 855 phones be?
This is the key question and one that remains as yet unanswered. Qualcomm has only provided a sprinkling of details so far about the 855, though if previous speed bumps are anything to go by, you should expect significant speed improvements.
More significant, however, will be the extra wireless speed afforded by the 5G capabilities of the chip. And 5G is may well be closer and more widespread than you think, with EE executive Fotis Karonis taking to the stage at the event to confirm that the technology will launch in six major UK cities – London, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast – at some point during 2019.
Qualcomm is set to provide full specifications of the new Snapdragon 855 tomorrow as the Snapdragon Technology Summit continues, so be sure to check back for more then.
Source: expertreviews.co.uk
