Qualcomm’s 7nm Snapdragon 855 is now official with improved imaging and efficiency

Just yesterday, an early leak revealed that Qualcomm’s next major Snapdragon chip would be called the Snapdragon 855. Low and behold, Qualcomm made the announcement today. Previous rumors suggested that the new chip would not be called the “Snapdragon 8150”, and this is now confirmed to be true.

The new 7nm process should yield noticeably better battery life while improving performance at the same time. Improvements to AI performance were also announced, citing “up to three times the AI performance compared to the previous generation mobile platform”.

There is a new dedicated vision processor that can now process depth mapping at 60 frames per second, which should greatly improve augmented reality applications. The new image processor also allows for 4K HDR capture at 60 fps, all while using 25% of the power used previously.

Two other separate things were also announced at the same event. Let’s start with the ultrasonic in-display fingerprint – Qualcomm calls it the Qualcomm 3D Sonic Sensor, which can still detect your fingerprint if it is wet or covered in particles.

As for 5G, well that’s the other separate thing announced: Qualcomm isn’t exactly putting an X50 modem into every new Snapdragon 855 chip it’s making. Instead, it will come integrated with Qualcomm’s new X24 LTE modem, capable of theoretical download speeds up of to 2Gbps. Manufacturers will have the option to tack on the X50 modem into their hardware should they want to include 5G connectivity in 2019 devices.

We can expect all the major smartphone players to make flagship devices with Qualcomm's new processor including the Samsung Galaxy S10 and pretty much any other 5G device slated for the first half of 2019.

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