Qualcomm Snapdragon 895 on its way
According to Chen Jin, General Manager of Lenovo China’s mobile phone business section, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 895 would have a much-improved GPU. Chen Jin teased the Lenovo Legion 3 Pro in the same article, claiming that it will retain some of (machine translated) “the industry’s best tuning capabilities.” The next Qualcomm chipset is codenamed SM8450, and it’s largely expected to debut as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 895 during the company’s yearly launch event in Hawaii at the end of the year.
On the Chinese social media platform Weibo, Chen Jin teased the enhanced GPU performance. Qualcomm is now unable to satisfy the demand for its premium-tier Snapdragon 888 chip, therefore it has resorted to introducing devices such as the Snapdragon 860 and 778 in recent months. That isn’t to say they haven’t begun development on their next big chipset. After acquiring Nuvia earlier this year, Qualcomm is working on a new chipset geared at high-performance laptops, but we don’t anticipate devices based on that architecture to hit the market until late next year at the earliest.
Evan Blass on the new Snapdragon Chip
We’ve already heard a little bit from famous leaker Evan Blass of @evleaks fame on what to anticipate. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X65 5G modem-RF system appears to be included inside the Snapdragon 895. The Snapdragon X65 modem replaces the Snapdragon X60 modem used in the Snapdragon 888. The modem, like the AP, is constructed using a 4nm technology. On non-standalone or standalone 5G networks, phones built on the SoC can connect to mmWave or sub-6GHz 5G frequencies.
Qualcomm Kryo 780 cores “based on Arm Cortex v9 technology” make up the CPU. The Armv9 architecture was revealed earlier this year, and the Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710, and Cortex-A510 were the first CPU designs to be disclosed employing the new technology. As a result, we expect the successor to the Snapdragon 888 to use these three CPU core architectures, most likely in a 1 x 3 x 4 arrangement (1X Cortex-X2, 3X-Cortex-A710, 4X Cortex-A510.)
What’s intriguing is that the Snapdragon 895’s GPU is the Adreno 730, which seems like a significant upgrade over the Snapdragon 888’s Adreno 660. While it’s hard to reach any conclusions based only on the name, it’s a significant numerical jump, and Chen Jin is already teasing the performance of the Snapdragon 895’s GPU. We don’t have any technical specifics yet, but we’ll find out more in the following months.