Qualcomm adds 3.2 gigahertz SoC
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The Snapdragon 870 is a high-end chip for smartphones. The designation 865 ++ would actually fit better.
Qualcomm has presented the Snapdragon 870. The chip is used by Motorola, Iqoo, Oneplus, Oppo and Xiaomi and is a derivative of the Snapdragon 865 or Snapdragon 865 Plus. Qualcomm actually speaks of “follow-on” instead of successor.
According to the old Intel nomenclature, the Snapdragon 870 would therefore be a Snapdragon 865 ++, because the actual design and production remain unchanged. Qualcomm has the System-on-a-Chip produced by TSMC using the N7P process, currently the most advanced with classic immersion lithography (DUV) instead of extreme ultraviolet exposure (EUV).
Qualcomm retains the Kryo-585 configuration as 1 + 3 + 8, but adjusts the clock slightly: The economical four Cortex-A55 continue to run at 1.8 gigahertz and three Cortex-A77 at 2.42 gigahertz. The fourth, however, the Prime Core, was accelerated by 100 megahertz from 3.1 to 3.2 gigahertz. For the Adreno 650 graphics unit of the Snapdragon 870 Qualcomm indicates a performance increase of ten percent, which means that the iGPU performance should correspond to that of the Snapdragon 865 Plus.
The 64-bit interface for LPDDR4X-4266 or LPDDR5-5500 remains unaffected. This also applies to the caches and IP blocks such as the ISP (Image Signal Processor), the DSP (Digital Signal Processor) and its greatly enhanced tensor unit for artificial intelligence. Neither the Snapdragon 865 nor the Snapdragon 865 Plus or the Snapdragon 870 have an integrated modem. Instead, they are combined with the Snapdragon X55 as a dedicated baseband. This reaches up to seven gigabits per second in the downstream and up to three gigabits per second in the upstream.
Qualcomm expects devices with the Snapdragon 870 in the course of the first quarter of 2021, primarily from Asian partners. Fast chips are very popular there, but they cost a little less to buy than the respective top models. Because of this, Qualcomm also had the 700 series with SoC like that Snapdragon 750G and the Snapdragon 765G / 768G.
The author of the article is Marc Sauter.
