Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 855 processor

In Hawaii today Qualcomm announced their latest flagship mobile processor, the Snapdragon 855.

Qualcomm said the 855 processor is “the world’s first commercial mobile platform supporting multi-gigabit 5G” dubbing their event a “coming out party for 5G.”

At the event Qualcomm confirmed earlier leaks.

Qualcomm said the device had their 4th generation AI engine which spread its work over all three different processors (CPU, GPU and NPU) allowing for 3 times better performance.

Qualcomm said their AI processor was twice as fast as competing Android OEMs and “considerably ahead” of Apple’s A12 processor.

Qualcomm said this would give phones “sight”, allowing them to recognize what the camera was seeing in a scene for example.

They are made much of their new Qualcomm 3D Sonic Sensor, which was an in-display ultrasonic sensor which Qualcomm said created a 3D image of  the ridges and pores of fingers and which works through moisture and oils on fingers.

Qualcomm also announced Snapdragon Elite Gaming, which offered console-quality gaming and audio on smartphones.

The processor, of course, supported 5G, and would show up in Samsung’s first 5G handset early next year.

Reportedly built on a 7nm process, the chip will feature three CPU clusters, using four 1.78 gigahertz power-saving cores and three 2.42-GHz high-end cores.  One of the 4 cores may hit as fast as 2.84 GHz. The GPU will be the new Adreno 640, with increased performance.

Samsung’s Galaxy S10 is likely to be one of the first OEMs to use the new SoC next year, with that handset expected to arrive in February 2019.