11 March 2020 . 01:29

Snapdragon 845: Qualcomm next-generation SoC for 2018 smartphones

Some companies are always at the center of attention of media and users. Their Leading decisions or products can change the market path and the approach of a wide range of other products. One of these companies is Qualcomm, a large manufacturer of SoC chips, processors and controllers used in various devices. This company has recently announced the Snapdragon 845, which we will be further acquainted with it.

What is SoC?

If we go back a bit, different processors and chips, although designed to do a simple task, were big. Advancement of chip manufacturing technology and the circuits inside chips getting finer, let their dimensions drop significantly, and the industry was so successful in this area, which was able to start mixing different chips in Making a single package. For example, most desktop processors today have an integrated graphics core.

In the world of mobile products, power consumption control is a key parameter in component design. This principle makes the various components in the mobile industry to be relatively simpler than their desktop colleagues. Therefore, mobile phone manufacturers have been able to integrate the components of a complete system into a single chip. Such a chip is known as the SoC that stands for System on a Chip. A SoC can include segments such as the main processor (CPU), graphics processor (GPU), memory, digital signal processor, Image signal processor, Wi-Fi controller, LTE modem, and many other components.

Snapdragon 845

Qualcomm’s latest leading SoC as always will power many flagship smartphones and powerful tablets, next year. The chip is equipped with eight Kyro 385 processor cores, the Adreno 630 graphics processor, the Hexagon 685 digital signal processor, the Spectra 280 image signal processor, X20 LTE modem, Wi-Fi controller, and a variety of other components. With a glance at the list, you can easily find out why it’s called SoC. The chip is manufactured by Samsung’s 10-nm technology.

Updating and optimizing each of these components, along with improving the overall chip structure and reducing its power consumption, allows manufacturers of various devices to design products with more features, higher performance, and lower power consumption. Some of the new features that Snapdragon 845 can bring for new products include:

Better performance

Naturally, every new generation of Qualcomm processors delivers better performance. The next generation SoC leader will show a performance improvement of between 15% and 30% compared to Snapdragon 835. At the same time, the maximum clock speed of the processor cores has increased from 2.45 to 2.8 GHz in this generation.

On the other hand, according to Qualcomm, the performance of the Adreno 630 graphics processor has improved by nearly 30 percent compared to the previous generation, the Adreno 540. So, we can expect that next-generation flagship smartphones using Snapdragon 845 will see a tangible performance boost.

Better battery life

Advancement and performance improvements of new processors are often at the expense of increasing their power consumption. Squeezing chip manufacturing technology is one of the ways that manufacturers rely on to reduce chips power requirements. However, the Snapdragon 845, like Snapdragon 835, has been manufactured using 10nm technology. This caused a lot of people to worry about energy efficiency at first glance. But Qualcomm has been able to optimize its new SoC by up to 30 percent by upgrading and utilizing a 3-megabyte multi-layer cache. In other words, you can get the powerful Snapdragon 845 advantages over the previous generation without any increase in power consumption.

Faster communication

The x16 LTE modem used in the Snapdragon 835 has now been replaced with an x20 LTE model. As a result, the maximum nominal speed of the new platform has been upgraded from 1 Gbps to 1.2 Gbps. Of course, achieving such speeds will be conditional on their support by the operators. Even if there is not enough support for such speeds, the use of Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) techniques with up to 4 antennas will also allow speed improvements on existing networks.

In the Wi-Fi section, it is now possible to use the 802.11ad standard, which uses a 60 GHz frequency band and provides transfer speeds up to 4.6 Gbps at short intervals.

Finally, a new implementation of Bluetooth 5 will not only reduce power consumption by up to 50% but also make it possible to communicate directly with multiple audio receivers (for example, a few speakers or both headsets).

Improvements performed on Snapdragon 845 are not ending here. At the same time, it should be noted that these are manufacturers of smartphones and tablets that decide which feature of a SoC they want to use in their products and how. In other words, different configurations of a platform’s capabilities allow these manufacturers to offer products at different levels of performance and price. Now we have to wait and see what features of the 2018 flagships will be surprising for consumers.