Qualcomm’s new flagship SoC is the Snapdragon 888

Enlarge / The Snapdragon 888, sitting on the world's biggest ARM motherboard. (credit: Qualcomm)

This week Qualcomm announced its flagship smartphone SoC for 2021, the "Snapdragon 888." The TL;DR is that Qualcomm's 2021 chip is a 5nm SoC with an ARM Cortex-X1 core and Qualcomm's first flagship SoC with an on-board 5G modem, dumping the mandatory two-chip 5G solution that Qualcomm forced on the industry earlier this year with the Snapdragon 865. Compared to the Snapdragon 865, Qualcomm is promising performance improvements of 25 percent from the CPU, 35 percent from the GPU, and 35 percent from the ISP.

We should probably talk about the name first. Qualcomm's normal naming scheme (and the rumor mill) would have made this chip the "Snapdragon 875" after the 865, 855, and 845 from previous years. The switch to Snapdragon 888 is apparently a nod to Chinese culture, which views 8 as a lucky number. Flight numbers out of Chinese airports often have a lot of eights in them, the Beijing Olympics began on 8/8/08 at eight seconds past 8:08pm local time, and now flagship Android phones will somehow be more appealing—I guess—to Chinese consumers, which also happen to make up the biggest smartphone market in the world. Marketing!

As usual, the CPU is sporting a very lucky eight cores with a single "Prime" core for higher performance duties, three medium cores to help out with foreground tasks, and four low-power cores for background processing. This year the prime core is getting upgraded to ARM's big, new Cortex-X1 core at 2.84GHz, while the medium cores are getting upgraded to the Cortex A78. The ancient A55 core is still working smaller-core duties.

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