Thinking About Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 (Premium)

Last week, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 845, the chipset that will power most of next year’s flagship smartphones and other mobile devices. Here’s a quick peek at what we have to look forward to.

As you may know, Brad and I were in Hawaii last week to attend Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Tech Summit. And in addition to the Snapdragon 845, the firm also made a variety of other announcements, including formally launching Windows 10 on Snapdragon and the first ARM-based Windows 10 PCs. Both of us wrote a lot about those initiatives last week. Here, I’d like to focus on the Snapdragon 845.

As you probably know, Qualcomm’s current high-end mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 835, powers most of the currently available flagship smartphones. The only major exceptions are the iPhone, which utilize Apple’s A-series (but also ARM-based) chipsets. And the Samsung Exynos chipsets, which power Galaxy smartphones in certain markets. (Samsung uses Snapdragon 835 for the Galaxy S8, S8+, and Note8 in the US and elsewhere, however.)

But the reach of the Snapdragon 835 may surprise you: Qualcomm told me last week that this most popular of mobile chipsets has been made available on over 120 different hardware designs. And it has literally transformed how we think of the modern smartphone.

This takes a number of forms. But the big milestone, from my perspective, is that the 835 was the first chipset, mobile or otherwise, to bring both CPU and GPU to a 10 nm process on a single SoC (system on a chip). As Qualcomm describes it, this milestone was an “inflection point of scale”, with the right performance, thermals, and battery life to drive a new generation of devices and, as important, device types.

We saw the first hint at this future on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+, which can drive a desktop display, keyboard, and mouse using a small hardware peripheral, DeX, in a way that very closely resembles Continuum from the now-defunt Windows Mobile. Not surprisingly, with the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm’s designs were, for the first time, being compared with Intel desktop chips. Sometimes fairly, sometimes not.

This comparison reaches its logical conclusion, as it were, with the new generation of coming Always Connected PCs. Here, we will see designs based on both Qualcomm (Snapdragon 835) and Intel (Core i-series), each with embedded SIM (e-SIM) support. The Intel versions will offer better performance. And the Qualcomm versions will offer better battery life and standby.

But mobile chipsets like those made by Qualcomm are quite different, architecturally, from those made by Intel and other x86 processor makers. I’m not a hardware guy, as you know, but one of the things that sticks out to me, immediately, is the way that these chips utilize multiple cores. Where there is no real difference between the processor cores in any given Intel chip, Snapdragon supports separate and multiple performance and efficiency cores, and they provide different performance and energy consumption characteristics, as those names suggest.

For the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm has raised the bar on both performance and efficiency, as expected. But the firm is also looking at short-term trends to determine how it should evolve its chipsets. And the result is an interesting set of capabilities that, again, provides a peek at what we can expect from the flagship phones we can expect to see throughout 2018.

The key areas, in my opinion, are image and visual processing, which relates to photo/video quality and capability, obviously, but also immersive experiences like Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and security. So let’s take a look at each of these areas.

As you must know, camera quality is a key concern for most smartphone buyers, especially when it comes to flagship-class devices: Every phone maker eagerly courts DxOMark, looking for a high score on the firm’s mobile testing suite. Today’s overall high-scorer is the Google Pixel 2 XL with a score of 98, though the Apple iPhone X scored a bit higher for still photography, with a score of 97.

Both of those companies are well-known for their imaging prowess, and in Google’s case, the firm has touted its AI capabilities for advancing the state of the art. For example, where other phone makers must rely on multiple cameras for such things as Portrait Mode, Google’s newest phones can do this with only a single camera.

Not every phone maker has such expertise, or such deep learning experience. So the Snapdragon 845 will level the playing field by adding the smarts, on-device, necessary for stellar photos and videos. Qualcomm promises that every phone that uses the 845 will achieve a DxOMark score north of 100.

The 845 is also optimized for AR and other immersive experiences. It achieves six degrees of freedom at room scale, so that you can quickly and accurately position oneself, and AR objects (“holograms”) accurately in any given space. It also adds something that Qualcomm calls Adreno foveation, which basically means that it will do all this more efficiently, with less heat generation and power drain, and with better visual quality. Combined with Google’s ARCore, this should help phone makers and app developers create truly immersive new experiences in 2018.

How about AI?

If you follow Microsoft at all, you may have noted this past year’s not-so-subtle language change, with the company moving from “mobile first, cloud first” to “intelligent cloud, intelligent edge.” The word “intelligent” refers to AI, and the word edge, in the latter term refers to a device used by an end user.

Put the two together and you arrive at the notion of on-device AI. But you may ask yourself why such a thing is necessary: After, Microsoft’s—and Google’s—key strength in this arena is the ability to supply scalable AI services from the cloud.

Well, as it turns out, you need both: AI in the cloud and AI on the device for the best performance and capabilities. Companies like Apple only achieve the latter—they have no real cloud-based AI expertise or capability—so this is a huge advantage in the Android (and Windows) world that can take advantage of both.

As described by Qualcomm, on-device AI can be used for everything from photography to AR to voice assistance to audio, and it can work in tandem with cloud-based AI when available. The key attribute here, I think, is performance: By putting AI on the device, users can results—answers—more quickly than would be the case if a roundtrip to the cloud was required. And, again, by putting these capabilities in the chipset that everyone will use, Qualcomm is again spreading the wealth. You don’t have to have Google’s or Samsung’s deep pockets and scientific expertise to providing amazing functionality.

The security improvements in the Snapdragon 845 are also of interest. As you may at least vaguely understand, most modern chipsets—mobile or PC—include some form of secure enclave, a vault-like location in which private data can be stored and accessed with the proper authentication. The 845 takes this a step further by providing a second, even more secure area on the chipset that it calls the secure processing unit, or SPU. The SPU will be used for improving the security of biometrics—fingerprint readers, facial scanning, and so on—so that it can be used safely with your most important private data, including financial data (Android Pay), health data, passwords, and other personal information.

There’s more, of course. The Snapdragon 845 also includes an updated integrated wireless communications chipset, the Snapdragon X20 LTE modem, which provides second-generation gigabit LTE capabilities, even better frequency band support, and improved power efficiency. It 60 GHz 802.11ad Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 with multiple simultaneous device support. It delivers 30 percent better performance than its predecessor and it does so while being 30 percent more efficient. But you get the idea. This is a big deal.

Looking ahead to 2018, I’m curious to see what hardware makers, which will ship 845-based Always Connected PCs, VR/AR headets, tablets, and other devices in addition to smartphones, are able to achieve with this chipset. But it’s very clear that Qualcomm has positioned itself very firmly for the future needs of its customers. And that’s true whether you consider Qualcomm’s customers to be direct (hardware makers) or indirect (the consumers and others who will buy those devices). 2018 is going to be a great year for new hardware.