The new generation of high-end mobile chips is coming. We know in a few months, all of them will make their way to the market. Among them, we should mention the Snapdragon 855, Apple A12, Huawei Kirin 980, and so on. Moreover, they will adopt the new 7nm process technology. Seems the earliest of them will be the Kirin 980, which will be officially announced on August 31.
But if the Kirin-line chips appear on the Huawei models only, the A-line has been developed for iPhones, the Snapdragon series mobile platforms are widely used in Android phones. Therefore, it has some dominance in the market. In its turn, this means people are interested in it more.
According to the previous news, the Snapdragon 855 will be renamed to the Snapdragon 8150. It will use the 7nm process, undoubtedly. Qualcomm has clearly announced that the new platform has been sampled to customers, and can be plugged with the 5G baseband. Plus, the related equipment is under development.
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Previously, there was a news that the Snapdragon 855 had already been put into mass production as early as in June. But the latest news shows that the Snapdragon 855 was probably only at a trial production at that time because TSMC will start mass production in the fourth quarter of this year.
This is also in line with the practice of Qualcomm Snapdragon flagship platform, which is released at the end of each year. At the end of February of the following year, it will be launched by Samsung’s new Galaxy S, followed by Xiaomi. This is the scenarios we used to see. But Lenovo claimed it will be the first to bring the Snapdragon 855-powered phone to the market this year.
According to another report, the Snapdragon 855 will integrate the NPU like the Apple A11 and Huawei Kirin 970 to support AI acceleration. Even now Qualcomm Snapdragon has a variety of models to support AI. But with the traditional CPU, GPU, DSP hardware unit, and SDK software development kit, integrated into the AIE engine, the acceleration efficiency under certain circumstances is obviously not as high as that of the independent hardware unit.
