The successor to the Snapdragon 845 is about to come out of the oven. The one that will be the brain of the next flagships of the future, the Snapdragon 855, you have everything ready to travel to the factories of those manufacturers who want to include it in their next beasts, terminals that will enjoy for the first time a new, quite special component: a NPU.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere
The trend of including automatic wizards and modes in the product software has led to Qualcomm to develop a CPU designed for this purpose. Basically, the novelty in the new Snapdragon 855 will focus on the incorporating an NPU (Neural Processing Unit), something that Huawei already did with its Kirin 970, and that now the king of processors seems to adopt its architecture.
A matter of balancing performance
The idea with this NPU is to balance the processor workload, since if until now the machine-learning tasks were performed by the less powerful cores of the CPU, now with the Snapdragon 855 this load will be released to pass it directly to the new one. NPU. Thus, the CPU will no longer know anything about tasks related to artificial intelligence, leaving all its power for other tasks.
When will the Snapdragon 855 be released?
Taking into account that its predecessors always saw the light at the end of the year (around December), everything indicates that this new brain will do the same at the end of 2018. Therefore, we could expect to see the first devices with Snapdragon 855 at MWC to be held in Barcelona in 2019. Rumors also speak of a 7-nanometer manufacturing process, so it will be necessary to know what influence this detail will have on energy consumption and efficiency.
Phones with Snapdragon 855
As always, the main manufacturers will be the ones who take the reins when it comes to rolling out the launch of the new SoC. As always, Sony will probably start to give the first details about it, followed by LG and Samsung, who usually use the chip for their variants in the United States. However, we hope that Qualcomm presents some type of reference design with which to intuit where the shots will go in the next generation. Any ideas about it?