Snapdragon 898: High Expectations

The new Snapdragon 898 has been talk of the town for a while. For good reason, too. Qualcomm’s 2-day Snapdragon Tech Summit is on November 30, 2021.

Qualcomm has the crown with the Android chipsets. Almost every Android phone uses it. But the competition (MediaTek and Exynos, for example) is slowly catching up, and Qualcomm might do everything to stay on top.

Every year they hold this summit, they announce their new chipset on the first day. With the Summit now confirmed, everyone is looking forward to the announcement.

This new chipset is the successor of the Snapdragon 888. There are several leaks hinting to a different naming of this. The consistent part is the model/internal code name: SM8450 (the previous one was SM8350).

What Could Be New?

According to the leaks so far, the new chipset is made on 4nm manufacturing process. They’re said to have increased the power and efficiency without increasing the size.

There’s no telling whether the chipset will be named Snapdragon 895, or 898, or it will have a different name altogether. The most common rumour is Snapdragon 8 Gen1.

Qualcomm has changed their chipset names several times. The ‘8-series’ launched by Qualcomm saw a significant jump in performance compared to other series. Because of this, there’s nothing solid about the name of this new chipset. Some say it will stay in 8xx naming system, some say there could be a 9-series after this.

This leaked Geekbench listing of this chipset is impressive. There could be Adreno 730 GPU with eight cores, a powerful core Cortex-X2 running at 2.42GHz, and three 2.1GHz Cortex-A710 cores. It also is rumored to have four 1.79GHz Cortex-A510 cores.

Main core speeds have been varying. But we can say it could be near 3GHz.

Which Phones Will Have This?

When this chipset is released, there’s a big possibility of every Android phone in 2022 will have this. Although nothing is concrete yet.

The most rumoured phone is Samsung Galaxy S22 in February of 2022. Xiaomi 12 could also release with Snapdragon 898 sooner than Samsung. (But the initial release might be confined to China.) It’s also rumoured that at least one Vivo phone will have this chipset.

This new release has stirred up the tech world. Everyone is eagerly waiting to see what’s going to happen. Needless to say, the expectations of Snapdragon 898 is high.