Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 888 mobile processing chip last year, and the company was confident that the chip will have no rivals for the foreseeable future. The newly developed mobile processors have already made their way to several manufacturers. They are already powering devices such as the ROG Phone 5, ASUS Zenfone 8, Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra, and many more. One thing common among these devices is that all of these smartphones are flagship devices of their respective brands.
Very recently, the news came to the surface that Qualcomm was planning on updating the processing chip. For doing so the chip manufacturer had decided to implement a newer CPU development process than what was used before for the same processors.
The latest updated Snapdragon SoC is codenamed Waipio and it will use a 4nm process, combining Kryo 780 CPU, Adreno 730 GPU, and Spectra 680 image processing chip. Waipio is said to be in testing with 12GB LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB UFS 3.1 storage. The newly upgraded SoC will also become the first processing chip to feature support for LPDDR5 memory and will also employ Qualcomm’s latest 5G modem, the Snapdragon X65. The camera interface for the devices that will feature the upgraded SOC will depend upon the all-new Spectra 680 ISP the details of which are not yet revealed.
Several reports have claimed that the development of this SoC is in its concluding stages, and within the third quarter of this year, a number of flagship devices will get their hands on it. Although the processing chip is codenamed Waipio, it is not clear as to what Qualcomm will name it. Additionally, the SM8450 or Waipio features the Qualcomm X65 5G modem which can offer wireless download speeds of up to 10 Gbps.
Qualcomm’s FastConnect 6900 chip will handle Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6E connectivity.