As detailed yesterday by Cristiano Amon, president at Qualcomm, and Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager of mobile, compute, and infrastructure at Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 888 5G SoC brings improvements all across the board, ushering a new era for mobiles, with big improvements in general CPU and GPU performance, Spectra ISP, AI, 2nd generation Qualcomm Sensing Hub, and more.

The 25 percent faster CPU, 35 percent faster rendering for the GPU, focus on gaming

Although Qualcomm has put most of its focus on connectivity, AI, and ISP, we'll talk first about the CPU and the GPU inside the Snapdragon 888 SoC.

The new Kryo 680 CPU brings a whole new architecture. The heart of the octa-core Kryo 680 CPU is the big Cortex-X1 Prime CPU core working at 2.84GHz and with its own 1MB of L2 cache. The Kryo 680 also includes three Cortex-A78 Performance cores, each with 512KB of L2 cache, and working at 2.4GHz. And last, but not least, four Efficiency Cortex-A55 CPU cores, each with 128KB of L2 cache, and working at 1.8GHz.

All eight cores share 4MB of L3 cache and 3MB of system cache, as well as access to SoC memory which is shared between Kryo 680 CPU, Adreno 660 GPU, Hexagon 780 processor, and Qualcomm Sensing Hub, all of which are a part of 6th gen Qualcomm AI Engine, capable of delivering 26 TOPS of AI performance.

According to Qualcomm, the new Kryo 680 CPU is 25 percent faster while being 25 percent more power-efficient, compared to the previous generation, which is an impressive performance uplift.

The Adreno 660 GPU has gained even higher performance improvement, with 35 percent faster graphics rendering, while being 20 percent more power-efficient. It includes several display enhancements, like OLED display uniformity, picture quality improvements, and Demura and sub-pixel rendering.

Combined with Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Gaming, Qualcomm's Adreno GPU will bring support for Variable Rate Shading, another first on mobile devices, promising 30 percent improvement without a reduction in visual fidelity, as well as Qualcomm Game Quick Touch, which will bring 20 percent ouch latency reduction.

These features come together with earlier introduced features like 144Hz/144FPS support, Desktop Forward Rendering and Updateable GPU Drivers, True 10-bit HRD, Game Color Plus, Fast Blending Technology, and more, all part of Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Gaming set of features.

Connectivity brings multiple improvements with 3rd Gen mmWave, Sub6, WiFi 6 and 6E, and more

The connectivity part of the Snapdragon 888 platform includes the Qualcomm Snapdragon X60 Modem-RF system and the Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 System.

The integrated 3rd generation Snapdragon X60 5G Modem-RF System brings support for 5G Sub-6 and mmWave support with carrier aggregation across FDD, TDD, with speeds reaching 7.5Gbps for download and 3 Gbps for upload.

The Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 System brings WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E support, as well as support for Bluetooth 5.2 with dual Bluetooth antennas for premium audio and more.

Big improvements for the camera with Spectra 580 ISP

In addition to an improved CPU and GPU performance, the new Snapdragon 888 SoC brings impressive improvements with the new Qualcomm Spectra 580 Image Signal Processor (ISP), which is the first one with triple ISP, capable of capturing the signal from three cameras simultaneously at up to 2.7 gigapixels per second. It supports staggered HDR sensors.

Such triple ISP allows for 120fps burst snapshots, triple 28MP photos, or capturing three 4K HDR videos at the same time. It also brings 4K HDR with Computational HDR, combining three 10-bit HDR photos with multiple HDR exposures. The triple ISP also allows for smooth zoom by using each ISP for a specific camera sensor lens (telephoto, wide or ultra-wide).

With the new Spectra 580 ISP Qualcomm is bringing 10-bit HDR HEIF photo capture, surpassing JPEG and its 8-bit compression.

Hexagon 780 processor and 6th gen Qualcomm AI Engine for big AI improvements

Qualcomm also brought significant improvements to the AI performance with its Hexagon 780 processor which is the first one to have fused AI accelerators, with seamless workload sharing between Scalar, Tensor, and Vector units.

According to Qualcomm, the Hexagon 780 got 16x more dedicated memory, up to 3x higher performance per Watt, up to 1000x higher hand-off time, adding up to 43 percent faster AI performance, drawn from 50 percent higher scalar, 2x higher tensor compute performance, and vector support performance gains for additional data types.

The Snapdragon 888 SoC also features Qualcomm's 2nd gen Sensing Hub, an always-on low-power dedicated hardware AI processor, which should provide an 80 percent task reduction offload from the Hexagon Processor.

As noted earlier, the Hexagon 780 AI processor, together with Qualcomm's Sensing Hub, Kryo 680 CPU, and the Adreno 660 GPU, make the 6th gen Qualcomm AI Engine, capable of providing 26 TOPS of AI performance, with software tools that allow access to the AI engine with new Qualcomm AI Engine direct.

The rest of the Snapdragon 888 SoC features include Qualcomm's Processor Security part with the new Hypervisor capable of instant switch between different OSes, or even allow specific apps to run their own OS (an isolated secure OS for each app).

We will be looking into more details about Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 SoC features in the coming days, and we expect the first devices based on the new SoC to be available in the first quarter of 2021, with Xiaomi, ASUS, Black Shark, Lenovo, LG, MEIZU, Motorola, Nubia, realme, OnePlus, OPPO, Sharp, vivo, and ZTE as listed partner OEMs.