After months of speculations, Qualcomm has officially unveiled its latest top-tier mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 845. Announced at the company's annual tech summit in Maui, the successor to 2017's Snapdragon 835 will power up the upcoming flagship smartphones next year. The processor boasts a huge improvement in artificial intelligence (AI) and camera capabilities.
As reported by Tech Crunch, Qualcomm Snpadragon 845 still features the same 10-nanometer manufacturing process, just like the previous Snapdragon 835. It also retains most of the defining qualities of its predecessor, although the company appears to be focused on the chipset's imaging support. This move by Qualcomm is not really unexpected, as the smartphone industry has been venturing into next-level photography for the past few years with the dawn of the dual-lens camera setup.
Qualcomm claims that the new Snapdragon 845 chip will allow handsets to capture superior quality of images at high resolution. The processor will provide the necessary boost for the smartphone's camera to achieve life-like snaps. This is all thanks to the chipset's new Adreno 630 graphics processing unit (GPU), plus Qualcomm's latest Spectra 280 image signal processor (ISP), which was teased by the company earlier this year.
With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 packed with Spectra 280 ISP, the handsets can now shoot videos at Ultra HD premium quality, with frame rates reaching 60fps. The chipset maker took pride in their latest creation, believing that any flagship phones next year that have the Snapdragon 845 are guaranteed to get a score greater than 100 on DxOMark benchmarking tool.
Meanwhile, Engadget reported that Qualcomm Snapdragon 845's AI boost comes from the onboard simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). This feature is very useful for obstacle collision, given SLAM's simultaneous six-degree of freedom.
Qualcomm promises that the smartphones powered by Snapdragon 845 will experience thrice the processing speed and performance of the current Snapdragon 835 chip. Further enhancing the upcoming chipset's AI functions are the additional support for TensorFlow Lite and the latest Open Neural Network Exchange frameworks. The regular TensorFlow and Caffe versions still exist inside the mobile chip.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 is said to have a dedicated secure processing unit, a feature which would enhance the current biometric system and data encryption. Of course, users can expect an improvement in reducing the power consumption. The Snapdragon 845 will only require a third of the total battery power, even if the energy-draining programs like video capture, mobile gaming apps, and AR/VR software are running.
It is expected that the first batch of flagship smartphones arriving in early 2018 will receive the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset.
