With the Apple A12 Bionic and the Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 980 already out in the market powering the flagship phones to beat next year, the spotlight is now on Qualcomm. The Sand Diego-based chipset maker will be unveiling it’s next flagship chipset on December 4 at it’s third annual summit in Hawaii. The chipset will power Android flagship phones, and possibly ARM-based Windows laptops in 2019. It’s not really surprising considering the Snapdragon 845 launched at the same time, at the same venue last year.
Qualcomm’s 8xx series chipsets are the ones reserved for flagship and high-end phones, and this year, Qualcomm could name it Snapdragon 8150. Going by the pattern from the last two years, it should have been called Snapdragon 855, and the leaked name could very well be the company’s codename for it internally.
A new leak by tipster Ice Universerse has also outlined the cluster design of the new chipset. Like the Huawei 980, the Snapdragon 8150 may also have a tri-cluster setup. The 7nm manufacturing process allows more silicon surface area to accommodate more transistors and as a result, the Snapdragon 8150 could have a tri-cluster setup as well.
According to the leak, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8150 will have three Kryo Gold with 256KB L2 cache each and a maximum frequency of 2.419GHz in the cluster. Then there is a single Kryo Gold core with 512KB L2 cache and a maximum frequency of 2.842GHz. Finally there are four Kryo Silver cores with 128KB L2 cache each with a maximum clock speed of 1.8GHz.
The Snapdragon 8150 will also have the new Adreno 640 GPU which may be 20 percent faster than its predecessor, the Adreno 540 on the Snapdragon 845.
Over the past few weeks, the Snapdragon 8150’s benchmark scores have been leaked multiple times. It was first spotted AnTuTu with a score of 362,292 points, significantly higher than the Kirin 980 and even the A12 Bionic, and the first chipset for Android phones to get over 360,000 on the popular benchmark app. In comparison, iPhone scored 316685 on the same benchmark.
The chip was also spotted on Geekbench where it got a score of 3,281 on single-core and 11,023 in multi-core tests. Both scores counter the score of AnTuTu and peg the Snapdragon 8150 lower than even the Apple A11 Bionic and just below the Kirin 980.
Finally, the Snapdragon 8150 was spotted on an AI benchmarking app where it beat the upcoming MediaTek Helio P70 and the Mate 20 Pro by a big margin.