Qualcomm unveiled its flagship Snapdragon 845 platform this year and the company is expected to be currently working on its successor. There have not been many reports about it till now but a new report by WinFuture, via Android Authority, sheds some light on the upcoming SoC. As per the report, it will feature an octa-core design where four high-power cores will be clocked at 2.6 GHz, while the rest will be low-power cores running at 1.7 GHz. In comparison, the current high-powered cores of the Snapdragon 845 can go up to 2.8Ghz, while its low-power cores run at 1.77GHz. However, it should be noted that the Snapdragon 855 will most likely feature newer architecture and might not require higher clock speeds to pull off the same amount of computation. The SoC is expected to be manufactured on a 7nm process.
The low-powered cores are reportedly called Silver cores, while the high-power cores are being referred to as Gold cores. They are expected to be semi-custom versions of Arm’s Cortex-A55 and Cortex-A76 respectively. The Cortex-A76 is expected to be tweaked in order to deliver a 35 percent hike in performance, along with 40 percent efficiency boost in comparison with the Cortex-A75. The new Cortex cores are said to near laptop-level performance. WinFuture further reiterates the presence of a dedicated “Neural Processing" unit to handle all AI-related tasks on the Snapdragon 8150/855 SoC. It is believed to be something similar to what Huawei integrates with its HiSIlicon Kirin processors.
The Snapdragon 855 SoC is said to feature a newer version of a GPU chip, presumed to be a newer version of Adreno, that could be clocked at 650MHz . Unfortunately, there’s no detail on what kind of core configuration it might have. The new chip might also sport a similar size of 12.4 x 12.4 mm as its predecessor and as per WinFuture’s source, it could cost just under $53 (Rs 4,000 approx), which is not a big jump considering that the Snapdragon 845 from the same provider costs around $48 (Rs 3,600) a piece, excluding the additional licensing costs. Qualcomm is said to unveil the new chip in early December at the company's annual chip summit in Hawaii.