We have already heard rumours that Qualcomm’s new and upcoming Snapdragon 898 will be manufactured using Samsung’s 4nm process nodes. Since this is the case, we can expect the new SoC to have both performance and power-efficiency improvements. And according to a tipster, the first sample test results offer that the new SoC will have a 20 per cent performance boost.
According to sources, the 4nm manufacturing process allows the Snapdragon 898 sample to boost performance by 20 per cent, however, this comes with the expense of increased temperatures. As for whether this news is true and Qualcomm decides to tweak the chipset to raise the performance bar or lowers it to keep thermals in check will be known once the chip hits the market in the coming months.
However, if Qualcomm decides to go with high performance along with high temperature then the burden will fall on Qualcomm’s smartphone partners to come up with decent cooling solutions to keep the Snapdragon 898 cool.
But, the recent claims that the Snapdragon 898 has a performance increase of over 20% seems like a vague one. The reason behind this is that the leaker did not mention what category has the SoC achieved the supposed 20 per cent boost.
Qualcomm could be aiming for a tri-cluster CPU configuration with the Snapdragon 898’s release, and the clock speeds for the Kryo 780 cores are given below.
- One Kryo 780 core, likely based on the Cortex-X2, running at 3.09GHz
- Three Kryo 780 cores, likely based on the Cortex-A710, running at 2.4GHz
- Four Kryo 780 cores, likely based on the Cortex-A510, running at 1.8GHz
There might not be much difference between the core count, however, the architectural differences of jumping from 5nm to 4nm, will be a big deciding factor for the Snapdragon 898 over its predecessors. Its also expected that the Snapdragon 898’s remaining cores will be based on the Cortex-A710 and Cortex-510.
However, there are still rumours and leaks that are confident in their information that the Snapdragon 898 is slower than Apple’s A14 Bionic. But the problem is not just the A14 Bionic which is already existing in the market, but the A15 Bionic coming along with iPhone 13 to shake the balance of the smartphone market.