ABOUT BENCH FORUMS PODCAST LOGIN REGISTER
PC Components▼
Smartphones & tablets▼
Systems▼
ENTERPRISE & IT
GUIDES▼
DEALS

Qualcomm Details The Snapdragon 888: 3rd Gen 5G & Cortex-X1 on 5nm

 by Andrei Frumusanu on December 2, 2020 10:00 AM EST
123 Comments | Add A Comment
123 Comments

Conclusion & First Impressions

The new Snapdragon 888 is overall a very impressive package from Qualcomm, advancing the most important areas for which today’s smartphones are being used. 5G connectivity was the big new feature of 2020 SoCs and smartphones, and the new 888 platform represents the evolution and maturing of the new technologies that had been introduced in prior generations.

The big focus point of the Snapdragon 888 were clearly AI and cameras. The new Hexagon 780 IP block looks immensely impressive and to me seems like a major competitive advantage of the new SoC design – other vendors which aren’t as vertically integrated with their accelerator IPs will have to respond to Qualcomm’s new advancements as it seems like a major performance advantage that will be hard to mimic.

Today’s flagship smartphones have diminished ways of differentiating themselves from one another, with the cameras still being the one aspect where vendors still have very different approaches to their designs. Qualcomm’s push for a triple-ISP system in the Snapdragon 888 pushes the upper limits of what vendors will be able to do on their smartphones, allowing for a continued push for the smartphone camera ecosystem. Even for still-picture camera experiences, it seems that Qualcomm is expecting a more notable technology jump in 2021 as we see the introduction of new sensors and imaging techniques, enabled by the new SoC.

The new CPU configuration gives the new SoC a good uplift in performance, although it’s admittedly less of a jump than I had hoped for this generation of Cortex-X1 designs, and I do think Qualcomm won’t be able to retain the performance crown for this generation of Android-SoCs, with the performance gap against Apple’s SoCs also narrowing less than we had hoped for.

On the GPU side, the new 35% performance uplift is extremely impressive. If Qualcomm is really able to maintain similar power figures this generation, it should allow the Snapdragon 888 to retake the performance crown in mobile, and actually retain it for the majority of 2021.

The new Snapdragon 888 to me looks like a continuation of Qualcomm’s excellent execution over the last few years. Striking a balance between performance, power efficiency, and features is something that may be harder than it sounds, and Qualcomm’s engineering teams here seem to be focused on being able to deliver the overall best package.

Much like the Snapdragon 865, and the last couple of generations of Snapdragon SoCs before it, I expect the new Snapdragon 888 to be an excellent foundation for 2021’s flagship devices, and I’m looking forward to experience the new generation.

Related Reading:

Triple ISPs: Concurrent Triple-Camera Usage
PRINT THIS ARTICLE
Comments Locked

123 Comments

View All Comments

  • MenhirMike - Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - link

    Apple bought P.A. Semi in 2008 to make their own ARM Chips, and evidently, P.A. Semi is a better semiconductor company than Samsung, Qualcomm, and anyone else in the ARM marketplace.

  • Ppietra - Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - link

    P.A. Semi no longer exists and a lot of things happened since P.A. Semi was bought, like Apple buying Intrinsity which was involved in the creation of the A4 chip

  • jordanl17 - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link

    I remember the headline a long time ago.. "Apple buys Israeli based cpu developer to make their own chips" I was like, "haha, yeah, good luck what that" I. WAS. WRONG.

  • jordanl17 - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link

    maybe they weren't Israeli based... (can't edit post?)

  • Luminar - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link

    The edit functionality only exists for the first 15 seconds after posting. This is to prevent people from going back and editing their comments well after the fact to appear less wrong.

  • Wilco1 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link

    This is not true - if it was, I could edit this!

  • trini00 - Saturday, December 5, 2020 - link

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/start-up-plans-new-e...

    Quite a interesting read, integration on a chip and the cache structure is some of the advantages M1 has.

  • headeffects - Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - link

    Is this true? I knew Samsung’s 5nm was behind but behind even the TSMC 7nm sounds shocking.

  • Lodix - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link

    No

  • Ppietra - Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - link

    I am no expert but I believe it happened because of very different visions/philosophies and objectives.
    ARM goes for smaller and less complex cores than Apple, believing it will consume less and that this will save space so it can add more cores in the same die, hoping for higher multithreaded performance. This would also probably be cheaper for other companies to implement.
    Apple on the other hand bet on bigger cores, maybe already envisioning that its development could in the end be more useful for computers, or at least the iPad. Apple believed that a faster core could consume less by finishing more complex tasks sooner. Costs didn’t seem to be a big concern for Apple, nor increasing the core numbers like crazy (remember when there were SoCs with 10 or more cores in phones?), nor Apple was constrained by what others might need. I imagine with these objectives Apple had to solve a lot of problems to optimize power consumption. Having to go through these challenges much sooner than ARM probably helped Apple to develop more efficient designs.
    It seems that Apple is just far more aggressive in developing its chips, and knows what it needs for its hardware and software.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.
BENCH
TOPICS
FOLLOW
ABOUT

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now