Snapdragon 888 Will be Qualcomm's Next Premium Chip
At Qualcomm's Snapdragon Tech Summit event, the company announced its next top-end Snapdragon chip, the Snapdragon 888. The 888 is expected to power most flagship Android phones in 2021. Although Qualcomm is saving many details for tomorrow's keynote, it did reveal a few top-level features of the chip. With its X60 modem, it will support 5G carrier aggregation (CA), which can offer up to double the sub-6 GHz 5G data rates compared to chips without 5G CA. The 888 is the first chipset to support 5G CA across TDD and FDD bands, as well as across sub-6 and mmWave bands. The updated Spectra ISP can capture roughly 120 photos per second at 12 megapixel resolution (a total throughput of 2.7 gigapixels per second). The new 6th-generation AI engine can process 26 tera operations per second (TOPS), (compared to 15 TOPS for last year's Snapdragon 865). AI is also part of the new 2nd-generation Sensing Hub, which incorporates lower-power always-on AI processing "for intuitive, intelligent features". Finally, Qualcomm promises the company's "most significant upgrade" in gaming performance.