Qualcomm recently held its two-day Snapdragon Tech Summit and while past Qualcomm Snapdragon Summits have been about the promise of 5G, this one was more about pushing the envelope on delivering on that promise and an introduction to the company’s newest mobile SoC for premium 5G smartphones – the Snapdragon 888 (pronounced eight eighty-eight).
Previous Snapdragon Summits had been held in Maui, Hawaii, and featured a full array of Qualcomm technologies. This year the summit was forced to go virtual and reduced in scope due to the pandemic and travel restrictions to Hawaii. As expected, the company focused on the on-going rollout of 5G technology and Qualcomm’s efforts to push the ecosystem forward. According to Qualcomm, 5G is hitting critical mass – the company expects more than 175 million 5G phones will have shipped in 2020, and grow to more than 450 million in 2021, and then more than 750 million in 2022. This includes the latest family of Apple iPhone 12s. If this prediction holds true, it will mark the fastest ramp of any wireless generation to date. To support the roll out, 5G is ramping in 40 countries by more than 100 operators. 5G technology also has capabilities aimed at fixed wireless and industrial applications (private networks) and is considered a critical competitive technology for many industrial countries.
Guests from Verizon and NTT DoCoMo touted the value and innovation driven by 5G. In addition to the carriers, Sony and OnePlus touted the value to mobile gaming with their partnerships with Activision and Epic Games, respectively. And of course, there is the promise of how 5G will enable future advancements, such as autonomous vehicles and lead to new businesses we cannot imagine today.
The New Star of 5G World
Beyond the promise of the future and the worldwide 5G deployment, the highlight of the keynote session was the announcement of the new Snapdragon 888 (SD 888). Key focal points for the new 5nm system on chip (SoC) includes improving camera and videography capabilities, faster gaming performance, and an improved AI experience. The name of the chipset tries to leverage the good luck the number 8 represents in the Chinese culture, which is needed during a year that has been full of bad luck with the pandemic.
The new SD 888 SoC will feature the X60 RF modem (modem + RF solution); an enhanced 6th generation AI engine with a new Hexagon processor, 26 Terra-operation-per-second (TOPS) of overall performance and a new Adreno graphics unit (GPU) with 35% more performance over the previous generation. The biggest feature improvement, however, was the camera support where the company indicated that it is “tripling down” on this feature set by implementing 3 AI supported ISPs to achieve 2.7GP/sec performance which is capable of 120 photos per second at 12Mega-pixel resolution. There’s also a new sensing hub with its own AI capability.
At the event Xiaomi was the first OEM to announce that it will be using the SD 888 in its next-generation premium smartphone. According to Qualcomm, other smartphone vendors that will all be using the SD 888 in upcoming phones include: ASUS, Black Shark, LG, Meizu, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Sharp, Vivo, and ZTE. While Samsung was not listed in the initial designs, we expect the company will also get on the SD 888 train shortly.
The New 5G Mega Chip
Details of the SD 888 were revealed on the second day of the event. This full system on chip (SoC) includes CPU, GPU, ISPs, a Hexagon digital signal processor that also is used for machine learning, a WiFi 6e modem and the 4G/5G cellular modems. It really is the most complex heterogeneous processing chip in the industry. And it is being manufactured in the leading edge 5nm process. Qualcomm did not specify which foundry it was using – TSMC or Samsung – and it could be using both. In comparison, Apple’s new A14 Bionic SoC does not integrate the modems and has only six CPU cores.
Qualcomm focused the technology enhancements of the Snapdragon 888 with the goal of making the smartphone better than its application specific device counterparts by improving on four key areas - imaging, gaming, AI, and connectivity. The Snapdragon 888 can power smartphones that exceed the capabilities of most HDTVs as it supports 8K HDR video. It can also record 8K HDR video for professional level videography. It even can deliver the best video conferences. For gaming, the chip supports higher frame rates than any console today.
Camera Processing Gets a Major Upgrade
Many premium smartphones are using three rear-facing image sensors for standard, wide, and telephoto lens, Qualcomm boosted the SD 888 to three Image Signal Processors (ISPs) in the Spectra 580, one for each image sensor for simultaneous processing at full speed. As a result, the SD 888 handles 28MP images, but it can also process a burst of 120 12MP images per second for a total rate of 2.7GP per second. That is a 35% performance improvement over its predecessor, the Snapdragon 865. That means all three image sensors can be capturing pictures or video in 10-bit HDR in 4K resolution all at the same time. The 10-bit native image support breaks the limitation on color and image dynamic range of the previous 8-bit image processor. Using computational photography and the AI engine, the SD 888 can seamlessly transition between the three image sensors when zooming, combine images and video for crisper high resolution, and enhance low light images allowing for use in almost complete darkness at 0.1 lux by accumulating HDR images and denoising the combined image.
The SD 888 can use the AI engine to deliver an improved and more intuitive user experience with improved auto focus, auto balance, and auto white balance for a true point and shoot experience the delivers professional-quality images even when the user or the image is moving. The enhancements also include the ability to capture and playback video in 4K at 120 frames per second (fps). From a security standpoint, Qualcomm is working with TruePic to create a cryptographic seal for photos. This help verify the authenticity of images to ensure that they have not been manipulated by hand or through new AI capabilities in any way.
Qualcomm’s Adreno 660 GPU will improve gaming performance with variable rate pixel shading for the first time on a mobile platform. By allowing the GPU to render the most critical pixels in higher detail rather than uniformly every pixel in every frame, Qualcomm was able to increase the performance by 35% and improve efficiency by 20%. With support for 4K and 8K displays, this technology will help performance vs fidelity tradeoffs for mobile games. Qualcomm also introduced a new technology for gaming called QuickTouch. The new feature improves the touch response time by up to 20%. The faster input response from QuickTouch can also improve response time when streaming on cloud gaming platforms. With mobile gaming growing faster than any other gaming segment, developers are looking to create a PC/console experience and these enhancements will bring mobile gaming a few steps closer.
The company’s 6th generation AI engine includes several major enhancements. The most significant is a redesign of the Qualcomm Hexagon processor. Not only does it include enhanced scalar, tensor, and vector accelerators for greater individual performance, the new Hexagon 780 fuses the three accelerators together through a unified memory architecture for better overall performance. One AI software provider that was highlighted with the SD 888 was AI startup Hugging Face, which highlighted its efforts to democratize AI by bringing natural language processing (NLP) to all consumers and applications, including edge and mobile devices. The 5G angle is that the company can dynamically load new translation data seamlessly.
An enhanced AI Engine, combined with enhancements to other parts of the chip that also can process AI workloads, like the Adreno GPU and the Kryo CPU, result in an aggregate raw AI performance up to 26 TOPS, which is a 73% performance improvement over the Snapdragon 865, and that is a 3X efficiency improvement in performance per watt. Qualcomm also improved the development software for the AI engine by offering a new toolkit called the AI Engine Direct that allows programmers direct access to the Kryo CPU, Adreno GPU, and Hexagon processor. In addition, Qualcomm is working with Google to add TensorFlow Micro support and improved the AI Model Efficiency Toolkit with mixed precision support.
And it would not be a new Qualcomm chip without enhancements to connectivity. This includes the integrated X60 modem-RF system and Wi-Fi 6E support, the first in a mobile platform. The SD 888 a first in Qualcomm’s 5G premium tier lineup to include the integrated X60 5G modem. The X60 modem system provides global support with all current frequency band combinations. It also adds 4K QAM and carrier aggregation between sub-6GHZ, mmWave, TDD, and FDD. The WiFi 6E standard adds a new 6GHz band that can help alleviate WiFi congestion. In fact, the SD 888 would make a great choice for a cellular router.
CPU Marks The X1 Spot
The new Kryo 680 CPU 8-core processor complex featuring the new Arm Cortex-X1 core running at 2.85GHz, three Cortex-A78 performance cores running at 2.4GHz, and four power-efficient Cortex-A55 cores running at 1.8GHz. The X1 is Arm’s highest performance licensable core and its inclusion will make applications start up faster. If you contrast it to the Apple A14 chip, the SD 888 has eight total cores, while the Apple A14 has six cores - two Apple high-performance cores and four power-efficient cores. Certainly there’s different tradeoffs that Apple and Qualcomm made in CPU choices, but the Qualcomm Kryo design is designed for fast single thread performance with the X1 core and also sustained performance with eight total cores.
There are so many other advanced features that will take time for OEMs and ODMs to deliver all the features. For example, the SD 888 supports a hypervisor, technology more known in the server business. Qualcomm expects that combining the hypervisor with the AI processing, an OEM can build a more secure mobile platform.
The SD 888 Will Spawn Other Products
As with prior generations, Qualcomm will be introducing other products for the volume and low-cost segments in coming months. Many of the features in the SD 888 will likely be integrated into the mainstream 7-series mobile platforms and Qualcomm’s next-generation Always connected PC processors in 2021. TIRIAS Research thinks the Snapdragon 888 5G processor will set the bar high for premium Android smartphones in 2021.
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