Snapdragon 895/898 SoC with X65 baseband exposed – uses TSMC’s 4nm process

For a few years, Qualcomm was quite consistent with its naming for its Snapdragon 8xx series flagship processors. Since 2017 (Snapdragon 835), it was consistent until the Snapdragon 888 SoC released in December last year. Instead of calling its December chip “Snapdragon 875”, the company opted for “Snapdragon 888“. Qualcomm claims that “888” is a lucky number in China hence its decision to use this number. With this deviation, the exact name of the SD888 successor will be harder to predict. According to Roland Quandt, Qualcomm is developing a chip with the codename “SM8450’Waipio”. According to him, this chip will be the successor to Snapdragon 888 (SM8350). A new report from @馬然熊猫 claims that this chip will be Snapdragon 895/898 and it will use TSMC’s 4nm process. Furthermore, the new report claims that the chip will also come with an X65 baseband.

Furthermore, @evleaks recently announced some information about this new product (SM8450 – Snapdragon 895/898). SM8450 is Qualcomm’s next-generation SoC, which integrates the Snapdragon X65 5G modem-RF system. 

Key components:

• Kryo 780 CPU core based on ARM Cortex v9 technology
• Adreno 730 GPU core
• Spectra 680 ISP image processor
• Up to 1GHz millimeter-wave downlink and 400MHz Sub-6 D rate
• Support Qualcomm Aqstic WCD9380/WCD9385 audio codec
• Qualcomm Security Processing Unit (SPU260)
• Support Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 subsystem
• Support four-channel package LPDDR5 RAM
• Adreno 665 Video Processing Unit (VPU)
• Adreno 1195 Display Processing Unit (DPU)

In comparison with the Snapdragon 888 SoC, the new Snapdragon 895/898 will have a stronger 5G baseband. Furthermore, it will support millimeter-wave or Sub-6GHz 5G networks. As a successor to Qualcomm’s existing flagship chip, there should be other considerable improvements. Its DSP is upgraded from Spectra 580 to Spectra 680, and the FastConnect 6900 subsystem will support Bluetooth LE Audio/5.2 and Wi-Fi 6E.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 specification

The Snapdragon 888 uses 1 x 2.84GHz (ARM’s latest Cortex X1 core) + 3 x 2.4GHz (Cortex A78) + 4 x 1.8GHz (Cortex A55) architecture. The GPU is Adreno 660 and it supports WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

As the latest product of Snapdragon 8 series, SD888 integrates Qualcomm’s third-generation 5G modem and radio frequency system – Snapdragon X60, which supports all major global millimeter wave and Sub-6GHz frequency bands, as well as 5G carrier aggregation, global multi-SIM card functions, Independent (SA) and non-independent (NSA) networking modes and dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS).

The sixth-generation Qualcomm AI engine integrated on the Snapdragon 888 5G mobile platform includes a newly designed Qualcomm Hexagon processor, with a performance of 26 trillion operations per second (26 TOPS). In terms of games, it integrates the third-generation Snapdragon Elite Gaming. Also, Qualcomm claims that this chip brings the most significant performance improvement ever made by Qualcomm Adreno GPU. It also comes with a 2nd generation Qualcomm Sensing Hub which “incorporates low-power always-on AI processing for intuitive intelligent features.”

In terms of camera performance, the Spectra ISP of SD888 supports faster billion-pixel-level processing speeds. Users can process 2.7 billion pixels per second to take photos and videos. This is about 120 frames per second and each frame is 12MP. The processing speed is up to 35% higher than the previous generation platform.