Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 – meet the power behind 2018’s flagship phones
The new Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor was officially announced yesterday but now Qualcomm has released more details about their new flagship processor.
The Snapdragon 845 is Qualcomm’s most powerful mobile processor to date. Amongst its skillset is the ability to capture high end 4K HDR videos as well as packing artificial intelligence.
Snapdragon 845 is Qualcomm Technologies’ third-generation AI mobile platform. It delivers 3x improvement in overall AI performance when compared with the previous generation SoC (system on chip). This promises to transform your mobile device into the ultimate personal assistant.
With these smarts you can expect it to simplify how you take pictures and videos; enhanced VR games, and make voice interaction more natural.
SoC
Like its predecessors, the 845 is not just a processor, but a complete system – hence System on Chip (SoC). Here you have a mix of processors and systems, such as a CPU, GPU, ISP (Image Signal Processor), and DSP (Digital Signal Processor), all contained on a single unit. Additionally, the platform utilises Qualcomm’s latest gigabit LTE and Wi-Fi modems for connectivity.
Powerful video and photos
The big new feature for this year is the ability to capture 4K video in HDR at up to 60 frames per second.
The 845 can also shoot slo-mo 720p video at 480 frames per second and 240 frames per second 1080p video.
For still photography, the 845’s Spectra 280 ISP can perform multiframe noise reduction on 16-megapixel images at 60 frames per second. It also supports supports a wider colour gamut and 10 bit color depth for 64 times as many color shades as before.
Bluetooth audio
The new TrueWireless Bluetooth 5 system will let a single device broadcast audio to multiple speakers or headphones simultaneously.
Qualcomm says that this system can provide a 50% improvement in power consumption for truly wireless headphones.
Voice activated assistants
Snapdragon 845 improves voice-driven smart assistants with improved always-on keyword detection and ultra-low-power voice processing thanks to the performance from the Qualcomm Aqstic audio codec (WCD9341) and low-power audio subsystem. This means that you will be able to interact with your devices using your voice all day.
In addition to the existing support for Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s Caffe/Caffe2 frameworks, the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (NPE) SDK now supports Tensorflow Lite and the new Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX). This opens it up for developers to use their framework of choice. Snapdragon 845 also supports Google’s Android NN API.
Availability
You can bet that this will appear on new devices from Samsung (Galaxy S9 and such) as well as other top-flight mobiles from the likes of HTC, LG, Google and more. The Snapdragon 845 will also be featured in Windows 10 PCs by the end of the year.
