Qualcomm's New Snapdragon 888 Processor Will Power the Android Flagships of 2021

Qualcomm has officially announced the Snapdragon 888 at its Snapdragon Tech Summit, offering a first look at its next-generation flagship smartphone processor. The 888 will power the next wave of 2021 Android flagships from companies like Samsung, OnePlus, LG, Sony, and more. From a report: In a first for the company's top-of-the-line 8-series chipsets, the Snapdragon 888 is making a big improvement for 5G: it'll finally offer a fully integrated 5G modem, unlike last year's Snapdragon 865 (which required that manufacturers include a separate modem chip inside the cramped interior of a modern smartphone).

The Snapdragon 888 will feature Qualcomm's X60 modem, announced earlier this year, which jumps to a 5nm process for better power efficiency and improvements for 5G carrier aggregation across the mmWave and sub-6GHz bands of the spectrum. Between the new 5nm architecture and the power efficiency gains from an integrated modem, the new chip looks to offer some substantial battery improvements when it comes to 5G. In addition to the 5G improvements, Qualcomm also teased several other advances coming to the Snapdragon 888, including the company's sixth-gen AI Engine (running on a "redesigned" Qualcomm Hexagon processor), which promises a big jump in performance and power efficiency for AI tasks.

What android premium phone will get this?

[cayenne8]

I thought I read in the article that Samsung isn't making any new flagship phones (theirs was the Note?)....

What other flagship phones for Android are out there that would get such a chip?

As you can tell, I'm not terribly familiar with Android offerings, but I have a couple of friends that are and would like to pass the info on.

Re:

[Dorianny]

Samsung makes so many variants that the waters are really muddy when it comes to the "flagship" label. The Note line was their ultra-high-end priced product and it is being replaced with their foldable line as it is very difficult nowdays to differentiate the Note from everything else, even in their own lineup. You can expect quite a few products in their lineup to use this chip, especially since using last years chip which has a separate modem is not likely to offer the cost savings it usually does.

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[aitikin]

I thought I read in the article that Samsung isn't making any new flagship phones (theirs was the Note?)....

What other flagship phones for Android are out there that would get such a chip?

As you can tell, I'm not terribly familiar with Android offerings, but I have a couple of friends that are and would like to pass the info on.

From the summary you're referencing [slashdot.org]

At present, the South Korean tech giant does not have plans to develop a new version of the Galaxy Note for 2021, three sources said, declining to be identified as the plans were not public. Instead, the Galaxy S series' top model, the S21, will have a stylus and the next version of Samsung's foldable phone will be compatible with a stylus, which will be sold separately, one of the sources said.

But as Dorianny points out, it'll likely be in a number of their "mid-tier" ph

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[itsme1234]

Skimming ThatFA seems that they won't be making it for the next year and anyway the higher tier S2x will be with a pen and the fold as well. Plenty of phones in 4-digit US/EURO territory, no worries, if there's anything shiny to add anywhere there will be plenty of models to chose from. Their line made no sense even before the pandemic but now releasing every year tons of "high end" (or at least stratospherically priced) phones doesn't make any sense.

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[NateFromMich]

What other flagship phones for Android are out there that would get such a chip?

Probably a lot, but it's too early for that. Surely Android Authority or Android Police will have something about that in the coming months.
The Verge obviously is kind of a useless sort for that sort of thing.

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[segin]

You know there's more than Samsung for Android manufacturers, yes? The list of manufacturers is HUGE.

Ever heard of LG, Sony, or Motorola?

Re:What android premium phone will get this?

[Xenx]

You picked three terrible examples. Motorola only produces mid-range devices. I'm not knocking them, just a bad example. Sony and LG are both having trouble staying relevant with Android. I'm not saying they won't make a phone with the new SOC, but they're largely irrelevant. Sony is doing it to themselves, they are following HTC in what not to do if you want to keep making phone. I don't know what happened with LG exactly, I just know that they started falling behind in mindshare. They're also making more niche designs lately. More power to them, but hopefully they find one that sticks.

Oppo, Oneplus, Xiaomi... those would be relevant examples of alternative flagship brands in todays market. Even then, only Samsung really holds any mindshare in the US market. You go to a carrier, like most Americans do, and you'll see Samsung as the only real flagship. Then, you'll have Google and the rest with all the mid-range devices. Now, those midrange devices are all great. They're just not flagships.

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[AmiMoJo]

The US market isn't where the action is any more because it's saturated and sales are down. Manufacturers are more interested in growth markets.

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[Xenx]

That is largely irrelevant to what I was saying. Samsung is still by far the top manufacturer globally as well. It's just that outside the US, it's more normal to buy your phone independent from your carrier.

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[AmiMoJo]

You were saying LG are losing mindshare and that Xiaomi etc. don't have flagships. They do, just not in the US.

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[Xenx]

I did say LG is losing mindshare, because it is. As for Xiaomi, I said they are an example of a flagship. I didn't specify it was due to their global presence, but it's what I was implying. I just also pointed out that within the US Samsung is nearly synonymous with flagship for Android. Those other flagship phones are a niche market.

Hexagon processor

[Ecuador]

Hexagon processor? Sounds cool! Haven't worked on packing problems before, I wonder, would it make better use of a circular wafer surface vs a rectangular processor? :D

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[OrangeTide]

Qualcomm Hexagon processor is a proprietary 32-bit DSP and not really related to real hexagons in any way. BORING

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[DontBeAMoran]

Sounds like a dumb question at first, but when you think about the fact that silicon wafers are round, I'm beginning to wonder... Surely there's an online tool that could easily compute that.

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[tlhIngan]

Sounds like a dumb question at first, but when you think about the fact that silicon wafers are round, I'm beginning to wonder... Surely there's an online tool that could easily compute that.

Most chips aren't square or rectangular because hexagons were too hard to pack on a round substrate - if hexagons worked well, it would've been done already.

The real reason is that hexagons work if you're packing the wafer with the same die of the same size, but that's only in a few things. Many wafers are multi die waf

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[Waccoon]

Cutting hexagonal dies out of the wafer is the hard part.

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[DontBeAMoran]

What they can say with certainty is that their new Snapdragon 888 is infinitely faster than their Snapdragon A14.

I wonder what Apple's reaction would be. Are all the "Ax" names trademarked? If you trademark A1, do you also automatically get the trademarks for "A[int][*]"?

Remember that Intel lost against AMD for the "286/386/486" trademark, that's why they went with "Pentium" and other names from that point on. Surely Qualcomm can't trademark "888" on its own, for example.

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[NoMoreACs]

What they can say with certainty is that their new Snapdragon 888 is infinitely faster than their Snapdragon A14.

I wonder what Apple's reaction would be. Are all the "Ax" names trademarked? If you trademark A1, do you also automatically get the trademarks for "A[int][*]"?

Remember that Intel lost against AMD for the "286/386/486" trademark, that's why they went with "Pentium" and other names from that point on. Surely Qualcomm can't trademark "888" on its own, for example.

IIRC, numbers cannot be trademarked/copyrighted. That's why Intel changed what was to be the 586 to "Pentium".

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[DontBeAMoran]

Yes I know, I even said that in the last part of my comment.

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[Junta]

But did you know that you can't trademark model numbers? I don't know why that hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet.

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[mobby_6kl]

A combination of numbers and letters certainly can, e.g. BMW M3

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[NoMoreACs]

How does it perform versus the A14 .. is it faster, more power efficient? Qualcomm has always been about 20% slower than Apple. It must be true this time too, because they haven't said it's faster .. they have not touted it.. so the answer is must be no it's not (unless they have a braindead marketing department).

Well, if it is still a 32 bit processor, I can't imagine it will be faster than Apple's line of 64 bit SoCs.

And as far as power efficiency: Why do you think Android phones have twice the battery capacity of Apple phones, yet still get nearly identical run times?

I doubt this is some revolutionary advancement in Qualcomm's offerings. Their real expertise lies in radios, not CPUs.

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[Dixie_Flatline]

The battery life thing isn't merely a matter of the SoC—Apple has better integration, fewer screen pixels and less RAM. Those last two are reasonable trade-offs, given that most people can't tell the difference at a normal viewing distance for the screen, and more RAM doesn't really help unless you want to keep a lot of web pages in memory or you're swapping between apps a lot. Android's flexibility incurs a cost.

RAM does not help

[tuppe666]

My god...RAM does help are you serious in any suggestion that it doesn't.

Go back to school. Hell watch a five minute YouTube video.

I mean it learn to code write a small game.

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[Dixie_Flatline]

I write large games. For a living. That's not really what we're talking about. (Even then, most code that I write isn't RAM limited; textures and models take up way more than my engine code ever will. I have to be more mindful of HOW I allocate RAM than how much.)

On A PHONE, RAM isn't the biggest consideration. 4GB of RAM is perfectly workable. You're not multitasking so much that you need to be able to keep 10 apps in memory at once, and I doubt most apps even get close to using all 4GB of RAM at a time. I

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[DMJC]

Ah, but now that convergence is happening, it is more important than ever how much RAM/CPU/GPU is in a phone, and how much is being consumed by OS tasks. I am a bit disappointed with the Librem5 specs, I'm hoping they release an updated model with more ram/CPU grunt in a year or two.

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[AmiMoJo]

Any efficiency advantage that Apple has is offset by their tiny batteries. They are still shipping 2,800mAh batteries when most Android mid to high end phones are around 4000mAh now.

My Pixel 5 gets a solid 3 days battery life with a fair bit of use.

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[NoMoreACs]

Any efficiency advantage that Apple has is offset by their tiny batteries. They are still shipping 2,800mAh batteries when most Android mid to high end phones are around 4000mAh now.

That's because Apple's SoCs don't draw as much power as an arc welder (j/k), like Qualcomm's do.

They don't need those mammoth batteries to get the same run time (and they do).

Nothing to do with Android

[tuppe666]

Very little to do with Android....everything to do with none Apple Hardware... customers given CHOICE want their phone to last longer, and have a bigger screen. ...The screen is produced by Android, and Mr Crook never stops bitiching about having to pay Qualcomm...so.

Get over is collect your money for your slowed down iPhone as the irriplaceible battery fails, but if you want to believe a logo changes another companies hardware. Go ahead.

Personally I am going to one of those other companies that offer me lo

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[organgtool]

I always hear about the amazing battery life of iPhones yet every time someone plugs in an iPhone cable, every iPhone user in the area acts like someone struck gold and wants a turn to charge. Meanwhile my Android flagship gets two full days on a single charge which is great for nights when I forget to charge it or don't have easy access to a charger.

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[NoMoreACs]

I always hear about the amazing battery life of iPhones yet every time someone plugs in an iPhone cable, every iPhone user in the area acts like someone struck gold and wants a turn to charge. Meanwhile my Android flagship gets two full days on a single charge which is great for nights when I forget to charge it or don't have easy access to a charger.

A lot of it comes down to (regardless of brand) the particular User's use profile, and to some extent, how old their phone is. In the field, you would have to know those two things to get any reasonable comparison.

For example, my ancient iPhone 6 Plus (with original battery) cannot last more than a third of a day when used constantly; but if I use it like an adjunct computing device (instead of my main one!), I, too, can still get a couple of days' worth of use out of a single charge. When it was only a few

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Oh goodie! Higher prices

[p51d007]

For these stupid things. Now, I can open twitter, Poke'mon before I even think I need to!