Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 released: flagship smartphones will fully enter the 5nm era
Unknowingly, 2020 has entered the countdown stage, and major mobile phone manufacturers have basically entered a "truce period", recharging their energy for the flagship war in 2021. If you want to get to know the new features of the new year's flagship first, you can get a glimpse at the Snapdragon Technology Summit.
At the Snapdragon Technology Summit, which is still full of Hawaiian style, Qualcomm officially released the first flagship mobile phone chip with 5nm process technology-Qualcomm Snapdragon 888.
Although this kind of auspicious meaning does not know whether it is deliberate, it always makes people feel like picking a mobile phone number. Qualcomm’s explanation for the new generation of flagship chips that did not follow the 8X5 nomenclature of its predecessors is that 8 is the symbol of Qualcomm’s high-performance chips, and Snapdragon 888 means:
"The name that best represents the flagship, the best of the best"
According to the information released at this summit, 5G, games, photography and AI are the main directions for the upgrade of Snapdragon 888.
It is worth noting that this 5G baseband upgrade is different from the external basebands of previous years. Snapdragon 888 integrates the Qualcomm X60 5G baseband that also uses 5nm process technology. It is currently the first to support millimeter wave and Sub-6GHz carrier aggregation and Sub -6GHz TDD-FDD carrier aggregation 5G solution.
According to the information released by the X60, the X60 can double the peak throughput rate compared to the X55 baseband equipped with the Snapdragon 865. More detailed parameters and design details of Snapdragon 888 will be announced at the summit tomorrow evening.
As the latest entrant to the 5nm chip, Snapdragon 888, in addition to catching up with its opponents in chip performance, is ahead of its opponents in 5G networks. The combination of millimeter wave and Sub-6GHz carrier aggregation technology can achieve faster speeds and greater network capacity, and more fully tap the potential of 5G.
The release of each generation of mobile processing platform most affects gamers or the improvement of GPU, and the improvement of Adreno 660 equipped with 888 is also remarkable. Qualcomm launched the third-generation Elite Gaming, indicating that the performance of the Adreno 660 is 35% higher than that of the previous generation, which is the biggest performance improvement of the Adreno GPU.
Both Sony Communications President Mitsuya Kishida and OnePlus Chief Marketing Officer Kyle Kiang, who appeared at the summit, said that the features of Qualcomm Elite Gaming make the top mobile gaming experience a reality on mobile phones.
The new one-gigapixel image processor (ISP) upgrade on Snapdragon 888 adds more possibilities to photography. It only takes one second to capture 120 frames and each frame is 12 million pixels. It means that with the support of more powerful computing power, higher-definition picture quality and smoother pictures will not be a matter of choice.
Now that mobile phones have become the most commonly used camera equipment, Qualcomm's President An Meng joked at the summit, "We are actually a camera company," which actually makes sense.
The improvement of AI technology is also one of the technical highlights of Snapdragon 888. We cannot do without AI technology when we use mobile phones. Every time we unlock our mobile phone by face recognition, we press the shutter of the camera every time we take a picture, and even every input method behind Lenovo has AI technology doing complex calculations. Equipped with the sixth-generation Qualcomm AI engine on the Snapdragon 888, it can achieve the industry's fastest overall performance of 26 TOPS (Trillion times per second).
More powerful AI computing power means that mobile phones can unlock more functions in the future. For example, it is mentioned in Qualcomm's demo video that in the future, it can rely on real-time AI calculations to complete real-time translation between Chinese and English, realizing "cross-channel chat in two languages" ".
After the debut of Snapdragon 888, Xiaomi’s CEO Lei Jun also appeared at this summit, revealing more news about the new generation of Xiaomi flagships: Xiaomi said that it will launch a flagship phone equipped with Snapdragon 888 soon afterwards. This is full of Many cutting-edge products of hard-core technology will bring even greater surprises to global rice noodles.
At the same time, Asus, LG, Black Shark, OnePlus, Meizu, Motorola, OPPO, Sharp, ZTE, vivo, Realme, Nubia, Lenovo (without Samsung) also stated that they plan to launch the first batch of Snapdragon 888 chips. For mobile phones, it is foreseeable that a new round of "machine emperor battle" will soon be staged.
After we have experienced the first year of the 5G network, 5G will usher in a soaring development. Qualcomm predicts that in 2021, global 5G smartphone shipments will reach 450 million to 550 million units, and will exceed 750 million by 2022 unit.
This is why, 5G connection will become a key point repeatedly mentioned by Qualcomm tonight. Qualcomm depicts the "ideal country" picture of a wireless high-speed network: larger network bandwidth allows ultra-high-quality photos to be uploaded and shared at any time; through the ultra-fast download rate of 4.5 Gb/s of millimeter wave, it can bring The extremely fast Internet experience of wireless fiber broadband and so on.
Both the personal network experience and the digital development of various industries will undergo huge changes due to the popularity of 5G, and all of these will be realized in the near future. Compared with the past, Snapdragon 888 has more powerful 5G communication capabilities. It will be a more powerful driver to push us into this ideal wireless world.
It is also worth mentioning at the summit tonight that Qualcomm does not seem to be satisfied with the mobile experience of the new generation of Snapdragon platform shackled to mobile devices. Mobile devices such as laptops and XR devices have become Qualcomm's new goals.
Arm-based laptops are no longer new, and there is no lack of Qualcomm among them. Now that Apple has successfully inserted the self-developed Arm-based M1 chip into the Mac series, consumers have become more looking forward to the new form of notebook computers.
Qualcomm did not launch a new notebook chip at the summit, but reviewed the changes in the mobile experience brought by the Snapdragon 8cx series to notebook computers.
At this point in time, the Arm-based notebook computer is mentioned, which makes us wonder whether in the near future, Qualcomm will release a PC chip that can match the Apple M1 based on the "magic modification" of Snapdragon 888? If stimulated by Apple, Qualcomm and Microsoft can go a step further on Windows Arm notebooks, this will be good news for the notebook industry.
Up to now, the official announcement of new phones equipped with Snapdragon 888 includes the world's first new chip Xiaomi 11, OPPO Find X series new phones, Realme Race, Nubia Red Devils 6 series, and ZTE Axon 30 flagship series. From this point of view, this "fafafa" Qualcomm flagship chip will still lead the flagship war in 2021.
#Welcome to follow Aifaner's official WeChat account: Aifaner (WeChat ID: ifanr), more exciting content will be provided to you as soon as possible.