The Snapdragon 888 is fairly new and its successor is not expected to be announced until December. However, there are already leaks for Qualcomm’s next Marquee chipset, which will power flagship phones in 2022.
Reliable tipster Evan Blass revealed what the full datasheet for the SM8450 could be. The Snapdragon 888’s model number is SM8350, so it’s only fair to assume that the SM8450 is its direct descendant.
According to Blass, the upcoming Snapdragon silicon will make the transition from the 5 nm to the 4 nm manufacturing process. This should result in faster performance and improved energy efficiency.
The chip is also expected to receive the new built-in Snapdragon X65 5G modem that emanates from the X60 5G modem that runs in the Snapdragon 888. The new system promises theoretical download speeds of 10 Gbit / s and should offer more stable 5G connectivity.
Elsewhere, you can expect spec upgrades in the form of the Adreno 730 GPU and Spectra 680 ISP. You can check out the full leaked specs of the Snapdragon 888 successor in Blass’ tweet embedded above.
The leaked information also suggests the use of a Kryo 780 CPU, which is based on the Arm v9 architecture. Arm announced its first CPUs based on this architecture last month, consisting of the heavyweight Cortex-X2, the Cortex-A710, and the lightweight Cortex-A510. So if it’s something like the Snapdragon 888, we can expect a Cortex-X2 CPU core, three Cortex-A710 cores, and four A510 cores.
We heard about the Snapdragon 888 successor with the model number SM8450 for the first time back in March. The chipset apparently bears the code name “Waipio”, after the Waipi’o Valley in Hawaii. The previous leak revealed that Qualcomm engineers were testing samples of the chip with 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS storage.
Qualcomm may be planning some major imaging improvements this time around. The new chip supposedly uses a new camera module called the “Leica 1”. Of course, that doesn’t mean that future flagships will be equipped with Leica cameras. However, the partnership could suggest that Leica is optimizing the ISP of the new chip.