Snapdragon 855 – NextGen Beast is HERE…!!!

               Qualcomm has revealed their next gen mobile processor called ‘SNAPDRAGON 855’ which is a successor of their last year ‘SNAPDRAGON 845’ on Qualcomm Tech Summit this week. They explained about the new improvements inside the 855 processor along with the new Qualcomm 5G modem improvements. It has to be noted that the Samsung and Oneplus are the first companies are gonna use this 855 chip on their next flagship smartphones.

Qualcomm Kryo 485 CPU:

                Most of the quad core processors in the market are split into 2 categories, one with 4 high performing cores to take care of high-end tasks and other 4 cores are low performing cores to take care of low end tasks. But this time Qualcomm decided to split the Qualcomm Kryo 485 CPU - quad cores in to three categories as below:

·         One prime core which is clocked up to 2.84GHz will take care of extremely high-end processes like high end games and having a higher cache memory for better performance.

·         Three performance cores which is clocked up to 2.42 GHz speed.

·         Finally, 4 energy efficient cores which is clocked up to 1.80 GHz speed.

Why Qualcomm processor has this kind of split up? Because if there are any single threaded tasks going on, then the prime core itself will be able to manage that task efficiently because of the larger cache memory compared to other cores. If this core will need any additional resources to manage the tasks, then the other 3 core setup will kick in and complete the job. For lower threaded tasks, the other 4 lower efficient cores will take care of the it. This kind of setup will mainly save the energy used for one prime core instead of using all the 4 cores at once.

Adreno 640: Qualcomm Adreno Visual Subsystem:

                Qualcomm claims that the new Adreno 640 GPU will perform ahead of the last year's 630 GPU with 20% increase in performance . Qualcomm and Unity are trying to ease the transition of Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) to bring the new level of reality to the game. Snapdragon 855 is the first chipset to support the true HDR support to the games. Below are some of the key features of Adreno 640 GPU.

·         Adreno 640 GPU

·         Vulkan 1.1 API support

·         HDR gaming (10-bit color depth, rec 2020 color gamut)

·         Physically Based Rendering

·         API Support: OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0 FP, Vulkan 1.1

·         Maximum On-Device Display Support: Up to 4K HDR

·         Maximum External Display Support: Up to two 4K HDR displays

·         Hardware-accelerated H.265 and VP9 decoder

·         HDR Playback Codec support for HDR10+, HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision

·         Volumetric VR video playback

·         8K 360 VR video playback

Spectra 380 ISP-CV:

                Spectra 380 ISP (Image Signal Processing) for Snapdragon 855 brings new improvements and it is the first CV-ISP( CV - Compute Vision) on mobile as per the company which will be used for improved Artificial and Augmented reality. Because of this, there is an improvement on object classification, object segmentation and depth sensing which will enable new features like bokeh video and as well as world’s first 4K HDR video capture at 60 frames per second with portrait mode as well and they claim that will save power up to 75%.  

Spectra 380 ISP also includes the hardware based EIS solution within camera subsystem and it also capable of  slow-motion video capture on 720p @ 480fps. It also includes the HEIF photo capture and HEVC (H.256) video capture as well.

Hexagon 690 DSP:

                Hexagon 690 DSP brings the first tensor accelerator for mobile with the Hexagon Tensor Accelerator (HTA). Improvements to the DSP should translate into improved voice assistant performance from hot word detection like ‘OK, Google’ to on-device command parsing, offering improved echo cancellation and noise suppression.

Connectivity:

                On the connectivity part, Snapdragon 855 is the first chipset that will comes with new WI-FI 6 (802.11 ax) and 802.11 ay milli meter wave Wi-Fi which will be able to provide a download speed up to 10Gbps. New LTE modem X24 is integrated on to the chip set will provide better performance than X20 LTE modem from last year's Snapdragon 845 and supports the speed up to 2 Gbps on LTE. There is a separate modem for 5G connectivity called X50 that will enable 5G functionality. Snapdragon 855 has Bluetooth 5.0 support and Bluetooth speed of up to 2 Mbps and it has high frequency location with dual frequency GNSS.