This morning we reported that Qualcomm were naming their next flagship chipset the Snapdragon 855 and that they would be detailing the new chipset at the keynote of their tech summit in Hawaii. This afternoon they took the wraps off the Snapdragon 855 and it looks impressive.
As expected the Snapdragon 855 will arrive with the 5G Snapdragon X50 modem making it the first commercial platform to support multi-gigabit 5G. So far Samsung and OnePlus have said that they will be releasing phones toting Snapdragon 5G in the first half of 2019. Australian networks have all Ames 2019 as the launch for their 5G networks, so we hope they’ll be ready when the phones are released.
The Snapdragon 855, built on the 7nm manufacturing process, will include Qualcomm’s fourth generation multi-core AI engine to give a three times performance boost in AI features over this year’s Snapdragon 845. The chipset also includes “Computer Vision Image Signal Processor” which will enable computational photography and video capture features — a world’s first according to Qualcomm.
Qualcomm also announced Snapdragon Elite Gaming, a set of new features to enhance the gaming experience on the mobile platform – these features promise better “immertials, visuals and sounds”. The details on this one are scarce at this stage so we expect this to not be ready until further into 2019.
Qualcomm’s 3D Sonic Sensor, an ultrasonic, in-display fingerprint sensor also made an appearance which is apparently faster, more secure and more accurate than the optical sensors currently in phones. We have been seeing the Qualcomm ultrasonic sensor in development for quite a while so it is good to see it finally making it to market in a mainstream sense.
With more events over the next few days at the Qualcomm tech summit we can expect to see more details be revealed before the week is out.
