What Will Qualcomm’s New Chip Look Like?

Significant changes are expected on the next top-of-the-range chip from Qualcomm, starting with the name: we could know it as Snapdragon 898.

We may not see any Snapdragon 895 this year or even in the months to come. It is essentially the indiscretion coming from one of the informants who enjoy the most credibility in the technological field, Ice Universe, referred to as the next stop of the range Qualcomm chip with a different name than the one used so far.

Qualcomm could continue along the line drawn at the end of 2020, when everyone, between professionals and enthusiasts, awaited the presentation of the Snapdragon 875. As the successor of the 865, and instead, as we now know, the Snapdragon 888 arrived. So, this year, we could see the Snapdragon 898 instead of the 895. 

An American leader would interrupt, at that point now definitively, a “tradition” on the vocabulary of the most powerful chips in the range that has continued uninterrupted since 2017 with the Snapdragon 835. Which took up the legacy of the 821 launched a year earlier. In 2020, Lei Jun explained the change of course: in China, the number 888 is considered lucky, so Qualcomm’s choice to turn to a previously unpublished nomenclature.

The Performance Of The Snapdragon 898

We should now call Snapdragon 898, the top-of-the-range chip for 2022, which will presumably become official in December. According to information from Ice Universe, it will be built on the brand new Armv9 architecture, which means that the CPU’s flagship Kryo 780 cores could reach the frequency of 3.09 GHz, which the same Ice Universe confirms to have seen, presumably on a pre-production specimen.

The CPU’s flagship Kryo will build 780 on Arm’s Cortex-X2, i.e., the evolution of the Cortex-X1 CPU that “powers” the current Snapdragon 888: only this step guarantees, according to Arm’s data, an increase in performance of 16%. Another difference brought to light by Ice Universe concerns the production process: the current one guarantees the production of 5-nanometer chips, while a 4-nanometer production process is expected for the next generation.

New Architecture For Efficiency

The new production process, on paper, guarantees greater power for the same consumption or, on the contrary, lower consumption for the same performance. The correct compromise will have to find Qualcomm, which, if it were to confirm the 3.09 GHz peak frequency of which Ice Universe speaks, should make sure that the new chip as a whole does not consume more than the previous one.

For this reason, rumors believe that Qualcomm can marry a new architecture for the design of the Snapdragon 898 to combine the high power of the best chip in the range with attention to consumption and temperatures, which are two sides of the same. Medal.

Thus the Snapdragon 898 would be composed of: a high-performance Cortex-X2 CPU-based Kryo 780 core, three Cortex-A710 CPU-based Kryo 780 cores for medium workloads, and finally, four Cortex-based Kryo 780 cores. A510 with high efficiency, two of which are at higher frequencies and the same number at lower frequencies.

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