Qualcomm Snapdragon 888: First SoC with Cortex-X1 chip

 

Hey guys, Hello and welcome to your own tech guide Technanalysia and today as you already guessed from the title, we are going to take a closer look into the newest 5G flagship processor by Qualcomm which is Snapdragon 888. It is the most powerful 5G flagship processor for Android smartphones unless Qualcomm is planning to launch Snapdragon 888 plus in June 2021. We all were waiting for Snapdragon 875 or something to be the next-gen flagship processor but launching Snapdragon 888 Qualcomm surprised all of us.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 888

It's still an 8-core processor using the new ARM Cortex X1 chip as the prime chip again, it has some major improvements in the new DSP department it has also the new GPU that's the Adreno 660 GPU & is supposed to be about 35 percent faster than the previous one which is Adreno 650 which's quite a huge improvement in the GPU department. And in the ISP department Qualcomm used triple ISP (Image Signaling Processor) and it is the world’s first SoC with a triple ISP setup so, here we are looking at some breath-taking photos and videos.

So, we are going to take a deep dive and have a closer look into the Snapdragon 888, into its architecture and will look for improvements and enhancements in each department one by one. let's break down the various components of this chip and let's have a closer look because of course, we will be finding the snapdragon 888 with the new flagship android smartphones that will be coming in 2021.

CPU

So, let's look at this image this gives you an idea about the chip itself and if you notice in the red color, we have this new prime ARM Cortex X1 which is clocked at 2.84 gigahertz and if you compare it with its older sibling snapdragon 865 there also actually, we had one a higher clocked chip that was known as the prime core which was Kryo 585 prime. But in Snapdragon 888 this is the first time actually we are seeing an ARM Cortex X1 chip by Qualcomm and if you notice this is clocked at higher compared to the other cores at 2.84 gigahertz and if you look for the cache memory this time it is actually a massive one-megabyte L2 cache and if you compare this with the Snapdragon 865 there the prime core if I remember had just 512 kilobits of cache memory the cache memory has doubled and now data will move a lot faster almost doubled the time compared with Snapdragon 865. It's actually an octa-core processor divided into various we have four high-performance cores the first one is that prime core as I've mentioned that's based on the Cortex X1 then we also have three powerful cores in blue color they're not clock as high as the prime core they're clocked at 2.4 gigahertz and this is based on the new ARM Cortex A-78 and again the cache memory is here also doubled guys it's 512 kilobytes of L2 cache, with earlier snapdragon 865 if I recall it was just 256 so, here also the cache has doubled so we’ll see huge improvements and also going to the architecture this is based on the new ARM cortex A-78 if you recall the snapdragon 865 was ARM Cortex A-77 so here we should see an improvement about 15 to 20 percent on this one and moving to the low-performance cores that are energy-efficient cores in black color we are still having the ARM Cortex A-55  which are carry forwarded from the snapdragon 865.

NEW X60 5G MODEM

Now let’s talk about another important aspect in this SD 888 SoC which is the new 5G modem. And the big improvement is that if you recall the snapdragon 865 did not have an integrated modem and the smartphone manufacturers  had to actually purchase it separately that is the X55 modem this is not the case with earlier Qualcomm chips and that's one of the reasons that many smartphone companies said that the snapdragon 865 chip is a lot more expensive and now Qualcomm is back putting the modem within this chip itself and they have gone with the new X60 modem this is the third generation of their 5G modem and has improvements like new carrier aggregation and if you look at this image as you can see they say that as it's now a part of the SoC itself it will consume a lot less power if you recall obviously, we don't have millimeter-wave here in India but many western users used to complain that on 5G specifically on millimeter-wave the battery life of these smartphones were just not that good. Qualcomm says that now with this X60 chip in the snapdragon 888 even for the millimeter-wave the battery life hit won't be that much and in fact, it also has improvements to the sub six gigahertz 5G the band this is actually very important because across the world most 5G companies are opting for the sub six gigahertz and they have carrier aggregation and mix-match of TDD and FDD with the six gigahertz pad. So again, a huge improvement for 5G implementation and now as this is a part of the SoC I am hoping that the overall power consumption should be a lot better for the X60 modem. Now another thing is that uh with this X60 they have also improved the wi-fi yes, we have wi-fi six even on the snapdragon 865 but guys if you don't recall it does not support the next generation wi-fi 6e that is wi-fi 6e(enhanced) that's going to come out in 2021 and this actually, supports the wi-fi 6e and they claim speeds up to about 3.6 gigabits we will be seeing a lot of new devices in 2021 with wi-fi six.

DSP

Now if we move to the DSP that's the new hexagon 780 DSP on this one and as you can see from the image here also Qualcomm says that they did huge improvements and in terms of trillions of operations since it's calculated by that they claim that the snapdragon 855 did about 15 trillion operations per second whereas this 888 will be capable of doing about 26 so significantly improved I would say. And because of this, they said that they have made huge improvements in AI operations they claim about 43 percent faster in AI operations and these days, it's becoming a lot important all this AI operations your cameras use it and a  lot of other features actually uses this, so it will accelerate a lot of things and in fact in terms of AI that is the tensor flow and all those things they are saying that you can get about 2x to speed and one important thing is that they say that this new hexagon DSP is more power efficient it's almost three times more power-efficient compared to the older counterparts and this is huge for a smartphone and they say that it's about 3x more efficient per watt so hopefully, this should help get us more battery life for the same operations. And in fact, for the shading memory that is required for these AI operations they say that they have improved it 16 times that's huge so AI operation, tensor flow, AI computing, and all those things that is happening a lot on these smartphones will be a lot faster.

GPU

In the GPU department, we got the new Adreno 660 GPU and Qualcomm claims that this is about 35 percent faster this is a huge improvement but generally, with every generation, we see a performance jump of anywhere about 15 to 20 percent but here they are telling about 35 improvement for the GPU at the same time, it is 20 more power-efficient. So again, I feel in terms of the GPU Qualcomm has done a great job and this also supports LPDDR5 this is not new even the older 865 did support lpddr5 but not a lot of smartphones manufacturers used it most of them use the old lpddr4 but, Asus ROG phone 3 was the only phone which used the lpddr5 but here the lpddr5 can go up to 3200 megahertz and Qualcomm say that if OEM actually bundles lpddr5 they should see significant improvements.

ISP

And now let's also move to the ISP that's Image Signaling Processor and we have the spectra 580 ISP with this one and we have seen dual ISPs but this is the first triple ISP that we are seeing and Qualcomm says this is the first in the world and they say that the chipset is capable of using all the three ISP at the same time so what can we do let's say if your smartphone has three cameras let's say a regular one wide-angle and zoom, technically speaking when you click a picture it can shoot capture all the data from all the three cameras simultaneously and they also say it can shoot 4k videos simultaneously from three different cameras so this opens up a lot of opportunities. It'll be interesting to see how these smartphone manufacturers take advantage of this triple ISP feature and yes it should also help in regular photography. Qualcomm specifically says that this new 580 ISP also improves the performance in low light so hopefully, the camera performance in low light will improve with this new ISP.

SUMMARY

So, Qualcomm has made a lot of improvements in various parts of the SoC it's not like they just did the work on one part.

I would say if we need to summarize this is the first implementation of the Cortex X1 chip that is the prime core that they're using it'll be interesting to see how it performs because it's supposed to be a very powerful chip and the combination with this arm cortex A78. Also, as they have now moved to a five-nanometer process it should be a lot more efficient if you remember the snapdragon 865 was based on a seven-nanometer process from TSMC now actually they have moved to fine nanometer and this is with the Samsung fabrication. Samsung is actually manufacturing it on the five-nanometer node also we should see general improvements because of the enhanced AI as they have told it has improved drastically and I would say in GPU performance as we said you should see about 35 improvements so again high-end gaming at the highest graphics setting should not be an issue.

So overall yes, it's an improvement we don't have any benchmarks and stuff yet but I think so by early 2021 we should be seeing flagship android smartphones with the snapdragon 888 chipsets. It'll be interesting to see how much battery savings do we get with this new snapdragon 888 SoC, but what do you guys think about the snapdragon 888 chipset do let me know in the comment section below, and guys if you have any questions let me know I’ll try to answer them. Also, if you liked it then let me know in the comment section and share it with your family and friends. And do follow me on Twitter for more technical stuff like this.