Qualcomm Details The Snapdragon 888: 3rd Gen 5G & Cortex-X1 on 5nm
by Andrei Frumusanu on December 2, 2020 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- SoCs
- 5G
- Cortex A78
- Cortex X1
- Snapdragon 888
Conclusion & First Impressions
The new Snapdragon 888 is overall a very impressive package from Qualcomm, advancing the most important areas for which today’s smartphones are being used. 5G connectivity was the big new feature of 2020 SoCs and smartphones, and the new 888 platform represents the evolution and maturing of the new technologies that had been introduced in prior generations.
The big focus point of the Snapdragon 888 were clearly AI and cameras. The new Hexagon 780 IP block looks immensely impressive and to me seems like a major competitive advantage of the new SoC design – other vendors which aren’t as vertically integrated with their accelerator IPs will have to respond to Qualcomm’s new advancements as it seems like a major performance advantage that will be hard to mimic.
Today’s flagship smartphones have diminished ways of differentiating themselves from one another, with the cameras still being the one aspect where vendors still have very different approaches to their designs. Qualcomm’s push for a triple-ISP system in the Snapdragon 888 pushes the upper limits of what vendors will be able to do on their smartphones, allowing for a continued push for the smartphone camera ecosystem. Even for still-picture camera experiences, it seems that Qualcomm is expecting a more notable technology jump in 2021 as we see the introduction of new sensors and imaging techniques, enabled by the new SoC.
The new CPU configuration gives the new SoC a good uplift in performance, although it’s admittedly less of a jump than I had hoped for this generation of Cortex-X1 designs, and I do think Qualcomm won’t be able to retain the performance crown for this generation of Android-SoCs, with the performance gap against Apple’s SoCs also narrowing less than we had hoped for.
On the GPU side, the new 35% performance uplift is extremely impressive. If Qualcomm is really able to maintain similar power figures this generation, it should allow the Snapdragon 888 to retake the performance crown in mobile, and actually retain it for the majority of 2021.
The new Snapdragon 888 to me looks like a continuation of Qualcomm’s excellent execution over the last few years. Striking a balance between performance, power efficiency, and features is something that may be harder than it sounds, and Qualcomm’s engineering teams here seem to be focused on being able to deliver the overall best package.
Much like the Snapdragon 865, and the last couple of generations of Snapdragon SoCs before it, I expect the new Snapdragon 888 to be an excellent foundation for 2021’s flagship devices, and I’m looking forward to experience the new generation.
Related Reading:
- Qualcomm Tech Summit 2020: Day One LiveBlog (10:00 ET, 15:00 UTC)
- Qualcomm’s New 3rd Generation Snapdragon X60 5G Modem, Built on 5nm
- Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865+: Breaking the 3GHz Threshold
- The Snapdragon 865 Performance Preview: Setting the Stage for Flagship Android 2020
- Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865 and 765(G): 5G For All in 2020, All The Details
- The Snapdragon 855 Performance Preview: Setting the Stage for Flagship Android 2019
- The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Pre-Dive: Going Into Detail on 2019's Flagship Android SoC
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lmcd - Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - link
820 was absolutely a disaster. Its errata list was too great for Windows kernel support, likely at the ISA implementation, and likely deeply-rooted enough to justify dropping the entire endeavor.Silver5urfer - Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - link
How is Windows Kernel coming into the picture ?It was about the Android performance and 64Bit compat due to Apple's move first and 810's ultimate disaster which even killed HTC entirely. 820 processor was very fast and still holds up, just like 805 but the latter was 32bit, One can see comparison of that with Apple's A9.
Entire endeavor was dropped because there's no need. Why do you think Qcomm develops a lot of the Radio and etc and tons of R&D ? Patents. That's what Qcomm is all about and they tried that with Centriq. But ARM on DC market is a dead end, so many years of articles here on AT and STH, so far no one is there on that side the only option which was showing some metric of performance that too for small loads is Graviton2. Only when there's a need then these companies push, which is money. Apple does it because they want to hold that position to leverage their pricing justification of the iPhone. Looking at any Android top flagship vs iPhone real world application performance tests and gaming loads it shows why there is no need for Qcomm to push, they push where there is money, GPU and NPU, ISP, Radio RF.
techconc - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link
Qualcomm and Samsung had different problems with their CPU designs. Qualcomm had a pretty competitive design. Their problem was getting blind-sided by the A7 with 64bit. They didn't have a 64bit design in their pipeline and had to abandon their own work and go back to ARM reference designs just to have something remotely competitive.Samsung found out the hard way that chip design isn't easy. Making a more powerful chip is one thing, but being energy efficient (and powerful) is quite another thing. They eventually scuttled their custom chip hopes as well.
That leaves ARM. ARM will design what their customers want. It's not clear that customers are complaining to ARM that they want more powerful cores. Maybe the X1 is a step in that direction. However, we can see lots of cost cutting examples in the SD888, so it's not clear that there is an appetite for an Apple like design for Android based SoC vendors.
ZolaIII - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link
A55 is not inferior, it's still the best in order A core ARM ever made. The so called Apple little core's are simple OoO core's inferior but closest to compare to A73. Problem is ARM never made a newer incarnation of A73 suitable for DynamIQ clusters. They did make Neoverse E1 and A65 which both thanks to SMT aren't exactly suitable for mobile phones and we didn't see any of their actual silicone implementations.I don't see a L3 victim cache as the way to go as it's limiting in many aspects. Faster RAM & bigger L2 cache should be a way to go.
Apple just makes your wallet cry.
AntonErtl - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link
The A75 is derived from the A73 (3-wide instead of 2-wide), and AFAIK supports DynamIQ. And looking at Andrei's M4 review, the A75 appears to be almost as efficient as the A55 at the A55's lowest voltage, and more efficient if the A55 has to ramp up the voltage (long before it reaches the performance of the A75 at its lowest voltage).Wilco1 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link
Even better would be a low clocked and slightly cut-down Cortex-A76. According to AnandTech at lower frequencies it is more efficient than Cortex-A55 while being much faster. It has a larger area of course, but you could cut it down a bit, and 4 little cores seems a bit overkill, 1 or 2 would be more than enough for background tasks.Irish910 - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Apple efficiency cores have much better performance and power efficiency versus other chips with a similar design. (High perf/low perf).It’s amazing to see what Apple has achieved since the A9 year over year just dominating performance while keeping power efficiency. It’s not even close with Apple GPUs.
You’ll probably squabble that Metal is more optimized than OpenGL.
When it comes to chip designs, whether you like apple or not, they are the best.
patel21 - Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - link
Was Samsung going to use AMD GPU this year ? It they do, I can see them wearing the Android Performance Crown easily.darkich - Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - link
I don't understand why they just don't ditch the A55 cores and use two underclocked A78s instead.The A78 is the most power efficient CPU on the planet at under 2GHz!..yes I'm not forgetting the Icestorm from Apple.
1X1 + 3A78 +2A78 should be optimal according to me..what am I missing?!
lmcd - Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - link
Die size considerations.What you're really identifying here is that the paragraph at the end of page 1 is extremely damning. Qualcomm isn't good enough with intricate work on multiple voltage planes to deliver a the best possible SoC.