Every year Qualcomm have their Tech Summit in Hawaii where they unveil many of their plans for the following year. This year of course it is online with the event starting overnight and Qualcomm wasting no time in announcing next year’s chipset flagship, the Snapdragon 888.

As a successor to the Snapdragon 865, the SD888 is an innovative leap forward with new gaming features, faster photography experiences, and a faster, smarter Qualcomm AI Engine. Of course 5G is also included with a new modem.

The Snapdragon 888 is of course their premium chipset for 2021 with a new, third generation Snapdragon X60 5G modem offering both mmWave and sub06 5G compatibility. the new modem supports all the 5G technologies you could wish for — 5G carrier aggregation, global multi-SIM, 5G standalone and non-standalone and dynamic spectrum sharing. Now we just need more 5G access here in Australia.

The new AI Engine has been completely re-engineered and is capable of 26 TOPS while at the same time offering performance and power efficiency improvements. With a view to the future there is also a second generation Qualcomm Sensing Hub allowing low power always-on AR processing.

Qualcomm have also included a faster gigapixel speed Qualcomm Spectra ISP. This allows users to capture photos and videos at never before seen speeds on a smartphone — 120 x 12MP photos per second.

At this stage Qualcomm have not detailed all the specs of the new premium chipset but will reveal that at tomorrow morning’s event. They have announced though 14 manufacturers that are working on Snapdragon 888 smartphones (which is not a surprise to us):

  • Asus
  • Black Shark
  • Lenovo
  • LG
  • Meizu
  • Motorola
  • Nubia
  • realme
  • OnePlus
  • OPPO
  • Sharp
  • Vivo
  • Xiaomi
  • ZTE

Notably absent is Google — either Google are not revealing anything or are simply not releasing a premium flagship again next year.

Stay tuned until tomorrow when we’ll bring you the full specs of next years premium Snapdragon chipset.

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