A day after initially unveiling the Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform, Qualcomm has provided more details about the chipset. The highlight of the platform is obviously that it has 5G support but there’s more to it than just that.
The Snapdragon 855 comes with Qualcomm’s new Kyro 485 CPU which is based on the 7nm fabrication process. Qualcomm boasts the new CPU cores offer up to 45 percent performance improvement over its previous generation flagship chip, the Snapdragon 845. The octa-core CPU cluster also includes a prime core that is capable of reaching speeds of up to 2.84GHz. Qualcomm has also made efficiency improvements to ensure Snapdragon 855 powered devices are able to easily last through a day of use. It also comes with Quick Charge 4+ support which can charge a device from 0-50 percent in just 15 minutes. The octa-core CPU cluster is paired with the new Adreon 640 GPU which offers 20 percent performance improvement over the Adreon 630.
There’s also a new Hexagon 690 Processor which has been revamped for AI purposes. It now comes with new accelerators including a Tensor accelerator for improved voice assistant performance and AI tasks. As per Qualcomm, the 4th-gen AI engine allows the Snapdragon 855 to offer 3x better performance in AI related tasks. Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform also features an ultrasonic fingerprint module that sits under the display. It works with wet and oily fingers as well. Another highlight of the Snapdragon 855 is its computer vision based ISP, the world’s first as per Qualcomm. The Spectra 380 ISP offers up to 4x power savings and performance improvements in computer vision tasks. It is also powerful enough to capture 4K HDR videos with portrait mode enabled. The HDR video recording capabilities of the chipset have also been improved as it can now record 4K videos in HDR10+ format at 10-bit color depth. And what’s even better is that Qualcomm has reduced power consumption while shooting videos by up to 30 percent. The ISP has native HEIF support so all photos you take are stored in that format to reduce file size.
The Snapdragon 855 is also the first platform from Qualcomm to launch under its new Snapdragon Elite Gaming brand. It promises to deliver “elite pro-level gaming experiences” thanks to the powerful Adreno 640 GPU with Vulkan 1.1 support. It also promises HDR gaming on mobile — a first in the world. The mobile platform also has native H.265 and VP9 decoder which makes playing back YouTube HDR videos up to 7x time more power efficient. Other key features of Snapdragon 855 Mobile platform include Wi-Fi 6 support for multi-gigabit speeds, support for up to 16GB LPDDR4x RAM, Snapdragon X50 5G modem, and more. Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform will first start showing up inside flagship Android devices releasing in the first half of 2019.
