Qualcomm detailed its next-generation chipset, the Snapdragon 845, at a press conference in Hawaii this morning. The chip features a ground-up redesign of the company's Kryo CPU (now the Kryo 385) and Adreno GPU, marking a major evolution of the platform. The changes to the new Adreno 630 GPU will result in 30% faster graphics performance, and Qualcomm anticipates the platform as a whole will be up to 30% more power-efficient than Snapdragon 835, a chip that has already proven to be excellent on battery life.

The new Kryo 385 design is based on ARM reference cores (Qualcomm isn't saying which ones), built on Samsung's 2nd-generation 10nm process. Each core has its own private L2 cache, and there's now an L3 cache with 2MB of memory.

The high-power cores offer 25-30% greater performance than those in the Snapdragon 835, while the low-power cores are about 15% quicker. The big cores can be clocked up to 2.8GHz, while the smaller ones are 1.8GHz.

The chip includes a new version of the Spectra image signal processor (Spectra 280) and a substantially more powerful iteration of the Hexagon DSP to allow for greater performance in machine learning and AI applications.

The new ISP will allow capture of HDR at 4K 60FPS video, a first in a smartphone. It also supports 480FPS slow-motion video capture (at 720p with HDR), selective motion capture, "deep" portrait mode, and various depth sensing technologies. Here is Qualcomm's quick hit list of the chip's features.

The Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform features include:

Qualcomm Spectra 280 ISP

-Ultra HD premium capture

-Qualcomm Spectra Module Program, featuring Active Depth Sensing

-MCTF video capture

-Multi-frame noise reduction

-High performance capture up to 16MP @60FPS

-Slow motion video capture (720p @480 fps)

-ImMotion computational photography

Adreno 630 Visual Processing Subsystem

-30% improved graphics/video rendering and power reduction compared to previous generation

-Room-scale 6 DoF with SLAM

-Adreno foveation, featuring tile rendering, eye tracking, multiView rendering, fine grain preemption

-2K x 2K @ 120Hz, for 2.5x faster display throughput

-Improved 6DoF with hand-tracking and controller support

Qualcomm® Hexagon™ 685 DSP

-3rd Generation Hexagon Vector DSP (HVX) for AI and imaging

-3rd Generation Qualcomm All-Ways AwareTM Sensor Hub

- Hexagon scalar DSP for audio

Snapdragon X20 LTE Modem

- Support for 1.2 Gbps Gigabit LTE Category 18

- License Assisted Access (LAA)

- Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) shared radio spectrum

- Dual SIM-Dual VoLTE (DSDV)

Connectivity

  • Multigigabit 11ad Wi-Fi with diversity module
  • Integrated 2x2 11ac Wi-Fi with Dual Band Simultaneous (DBS) support
  • 11k/r/v: Carrier Wi-Fi enhanced mobility, fast acquisition and congestion mitigation
  • Bluetooth 5 with proprietary enhancements for ultra-low power wireless ear bud support and direct audio broadcast to multiple devices

Secure Processing Unit

- Biometric authentication (fingerprint, iris, voice, face)

- User and app data protection

- Integrated use-cases such as integrated SIM, Payments, and more

Qualcomm Aqstic Audio

  • Qualcomm Aqstic audio codec(WCD934x):

Playback:

  • Dynamic range: 130dB, THD+N: -109dB
  • Native DSD support (DSD64/DSD128), PCM up to 384kHz/32bit
  • Low power voice activation: 0.65mA

Record:

  • Dynamic range: 109dB, THD+N: -103dB
  • Sampling: Up to 192kHz/24bit

Qualcomm® Quick Charge™ 4+

Kryo 385 CPU

-Four performance cores up to 2.8GHz (25 percent performance uplift compared to previous generation)

- Four efficiency cores up to 1.8GHz

-2MB shared L3 cache (new)

-3MB system cache (new)

10-nanometer (nm) LPP FinFET process technology

Snapdragon 845 also contains a dedicated "secure processing unit" that exists on a power "island" on the chipset. The new chip will be able to execute biometric or key authentication without ever running code on the primary processor, rendering it much more difficult to compromise your authentication data.

The new X20 LTE modem will support 5x Carrier Aggregation, allowing peak speeds up to 1.2Gbps, a 20% improvement over the X16 modem found in the Snapdragon 835. The X20 will support dual LTE SIM connectivity, meaning your phone won't have to keep one SIM on 2G or 3G, which should be great news in countries where dual SIM phones are common.

Wi-Fi performance is up, too. Fast initial link setup for 802.11ac networks will result in up to 16x improvement in connection initialization speeds, and will be up to 30% more efficient.

Bluetooth is getting capability upgrades in the form of multi-device broadcasting, allowing your phone to broadcast to multiple Bluetooth devices at once. Qualcomm says this will have significant implications for truly wireless earbuds, as current implementations have one earbud acting as a receiver and broadcaster, sending the audio signal to the second earbud. This new Bluetooth capability will allow the phone to broadcast to both earbuds, meaning the earbuds don't need to do any transmitting (this should also improve reception performance, theoretically).

For more, check out the press release below or the official site here.

PRESS RELEASE