SNAPDRAGON 865 (5G) MOBILE PLATFORM

Most of you might have already know the fact that latest Snapdragon 865 chipset from Qualcomm is 5G capable. Almost all the major phone brands (no official list out yet) in the market are trying to deploy Snapdragon 865 chip in their flagship models expect Apple (of course they have A13 Bionic chip, that's different story on its own and we will save that for later) and Huawei.


Architectural change !!! Is it good or bad ?

Qualcomm decided with go with dedicated X55 modem for 5G connectivity unlike its predecessor SD 855 which came with onboard modem consolidated everything into one single chip. What does this architectural change mean? It could lead to faster battery drains no matter whether you are connected to 4G or 5G network. To counter this I'd expect phones having SD 865 coming with bigger batteries, bigger displays and of course at higher price points. Do you remember HTC releasing thunderbolt? Yeah it was similar approach where they went with separate modem for 4G needless to say that was a disaster. But it would be premature to comment on this at this time. Only time will tell whether this change will improve or degrade the performance based on how it is implemented.

Technical Specs:

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 is beefed up with improved Kryo 585 CPU, Adreno 650 GPU, Hexagon 698 DSP and Spectra 480 ISP. Qualcomm claimed that SD 865 supports all kinds of 5G network i.e mm wave, low-band and mid-band, updateable GPU drivers and 144 Hz (QHD)/ 90 Hz (4K) displays which delivers smooth gaming performance with pretty good frame refresh rates which for sure gamers will love. Qualcomm boasts that the CPU upgrade from Kryo 485 to Kryo 585 has shown a performance boost over 25% compared to SD 855. The quad core processor in SD 865 is equipped with latest Cortex A77 with prime core clocking at speeds of 2.84 GHz and other three cores with the speeds as high as 2.42 GHz. When you look at the CPU speeds these are no different from SD 855, but the catch is CPU cluster's L3 cache has been increased from 2 to 4 MB, also the GPU upgrade from Adreno 640 to 650 has shown significant 20% performance increase. Qualcomm told that this GPU and CPU are designed to deliver sustained performance without any throttling. With the combination of Kryo 585, Adreno 650, Hexagon 698, Qualcomm points out that AI computing performance is 2 times better i.e. 15 TOPS than AI performance in SD 855 which was delivering about 7 TOPS. On to the Image processor SD 865 comes with Spectra 480 which processes image at 2 Gigapixels per second, now those numbers in real world mean we are talking about capturing 4K 30fps video at 64 megapixel/ frame which also allows simultaneously clicking high quality images at 200 megapixels. New Spectra 480 is also capable of recording 8K videos at 33 megapixel/ frame, for some high refresh rate displays like 120 HZs, Sepctra 480 offers native 4K video recording at 120 fps which means buttery smooth videos. But we will have to wait and see how effectively does mobile manufacturing companies can make use of this high performance chipset to get the most out of it combating battery drain issues and keep the mobile devices as sleek as possible.


My take on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865:

To be honest, im quite impressed with the performance package that SD 865 has to offer. But at the moment one con overweighs all the pros for me i.e. having a separate X55 modem requires more power which gets me thinking about the battery. Not just that with 5G still in infancy, big names like ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint are not there yet in terms of delivering REAL 5G speeds and they have a lot of ground to cover. And I see this is just as a start to the adapting of 5G technology and i expect to see lot of changes in terms of hardware all across the board in coming years. That's my two cents.