Qualcomm’s new flagship SoC is the Snapdragon 888

Qualcomm’s new flagship SoC is the Snapdragon 888

3 years ago
Anonymous $RGO3jP_V_c

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/qualcomms-new-flagship-soc-is-the-snapdragon-888/

This week Qualcomm announced its flagship smartphone SoC for 2021, the "Snapdragon 888." The TL;DR is that Qualcomm's 2021 chip is a 5nm SoC with an ARM Cortex-X1 core and Qualcomm's first flagship SoC with an on-board 5G modem, dumping the mandatory two-chip 5G solution that Qualcomm forced on the industry earlier this year with the Snapdragon 865. Compared to the Snapdragon 865, Qualcomm is promising performance improvements of 25 percent from the CPU, 35 percent from the GPU, and 35 percent from the ISP.

We should probably talk about the name first. Qualcomm's normal naming scheme (and the rumor mill) would have made this chip the "Snapdragon 875" after the 865, 855, and 845 from previous years. The switch to Snapdragon 888 is apparently a nod to Chinese culture, which views 8 as a lucky number. Flight numbers out of Chinese airports often have a lot of eights in them, the Beijing Olympics began on 8/8/08 at eight seconds past 8:08pm local time, and now flagship Android phones will somehow be more appealing—I guess—to Chinese consumers, which also happen to make up the biggest smartphone market in the world. Marketing!