Qualcomm might be late to the party when it comes to launching the current generation of smartphone SoCs, but it is poised to make up for it to a good measure. While Apple has already launched its superlative A12 Bionic chip and Huawei has broken benchmark records with the Kirin 980 in the Android camp, news as well as leaked benchmark numbers for Qualcomm's upcoming flagship Snapdragon chip have already begun pouring out. The biggest news to this effect comes from reports alluding to Qualcomm planning on launching the new flagship Snapdragon chip on December 4 this year.
While there is no official confirmation about the date or even the name of the upcoming Snapdragon SOC, prior reports have pegged the chip to be named the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8150. This is a major break from the company's Snapdragon 8XX nomenclature for its top-end chipsets and seems more like the MSM 8XXX model numbers assigned to the same chipsets. However, there's consensus among leaksters and the industry in general that the new chip will be adopting the new nomenclature.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8150 Expected to Launch on December 4
Although not officially announced, the launch for the new SoC is purportedly going to take place on December 4, according to noted Twitter-based leakster going by the handle Ice Universe. The tip-off is based on a number of Chinese tech media professionals receiving invites to the Qualcomm Technology Summit on that date which will take place in Hawaii. Interestingly, that has historically been the venue where the company announces its new consumer grade chips. Qualcomm seems to have chosen to send the event invites out to the Chinese media first, with the rest of the media expected to receive the invites later.
As expected, the Snapdragon 8150 chip will power a good chunk of the Android flagship smartphones next year. As far as leaked benchmarks go, Qualcomm seems to have upped its game on this count. The Geekbench and AnTuTu benchmark numbers posted by the Snapdragon 8150-powered phones lay waste to pretty much anything in existence from the Android camp, with a Geekbench multi-core score of 10,608 being more than 15 percent better than the fastest Android phone (Asus ROG Phone) on the market. Interestingly, the massive 362,292 point score posted by the upcoming Qualcomm chip is surprisingly more than that of the Apple A12 Bionic SoC, which could only muster up 352,405 points.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8150 Crushes Competition in AI Computation
While the multi-core performance of the Snapdragon 8150 is better than the erstwhile Apple flagship A11 Bionic chip, it still lags behind in single core performance, with the current gen A12 Bionic summarily trouncing the Snapdragon on all parameters. On the bright side, Qualcomm's upcoming chip excels in AI computation and beats the closest Android-based competitor, the HSilicon Kirin 980, by posting nearly twice the number of points in the AI benchmark score. Sadly, the benchmark doesn't measure the AI performance of the A12 Bionic chip due to the closed nature of Apple's AI ecosystem.
With impressive AI performance figures, the Snapdragon 8150 is expected to enable next year's flagship Android smartphones to bring further AI integration and potentially improve smartphone applications in a fundamental manner. The core structure for the new chipset seems to be different as well. This includes a variation of the ARM big.LITTLE architecture bearing one large performance centric core clocked at 2.84GHz, three balanced cores running at 2.4GHz, and finally four efficiency oriented cores limited to 1.78GHz. The new Adreno 640 GPU is expected to be 20 percent faster than the outgoing version.
