With the launch of the flagship Snapdragon 875 now less than a month away, all eyes are now on Qualcomm. The chipset is scheduled to be announced on December 1 but there has already been a bunch of leaks revealing key information, and even benchmark scores. A new leak now reinforces some old information, indicating the Snapdragon 875 could prove to be one of the biggest leap in mobile performance for the San Diego-based chip designer.
A Weibo report from China claims the Snapdragon 875 will be manufactured on a 5nm node. Now, this was known previously, but there was confusion whether it was Samsung or TSMC who is making it for Qualcomm. The latest report from China claimed Qualcomm was initially getting the chips made on Samsung’s 5nm platform, but owing to production issues, the orders were shifted to TSMC, which is also manufacturing 5nm chips for Apple and Huawei. Qualcomm has already lost the race in becoming the first to launch a 5nm chip for mobiles, but it would ultimately come down to the performance and efficiency gains that will eventually define the success of the upcoming flagship chip.
And we do expect a big leap in performance. A previous leak gave out AnTuTu scores of a Qualcomm SD875 Reference Device, pegging it 25% faster than the previous Snapdragon 865+. The gain is likely due to the use of one super core, three high-performance cores, and four efficiency cores.
The new leak claims the Snapdragon 875 will sport one super core clocked at 2.84GHz, three ARM Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.42GHz, and four ARM Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. The tri-cluster CPU arrangement is not new, but what would be interesting to see is the performance of the super core. This is likely to be based on the Cortex-X1 core that ARM unveiled in June. The leak also states the Snapdragon 875 will have the Adreno 660 GPU, and the Snapdragon X60 5G modem.
However, it remains to be seen whether Qualcomm integrates the 5G modem like it did with the 4G LTE modems, or keep it discrete like the 5G modem on the Snapdragon 865.