Qualcomm has announced the dates of the Tech Summit 2021 event, during which the Snapdragon 898 will most likely be unveiled
Despite the chip crisis reaping victims in spades, Qualcomm could present the best chip in its 2022 offering even earlier than last year. The seriousness of the current situation is well known and evident to everybody: smartphones, laptops and derivatives are not to be found, and even the car industry is going through serious difficulties.
The reason is as simple as apparently unresolvable in the short and medium term: the chip industry is not able to produce enough chips to satisfy the demand, driven crazy by the pandemic and its new needs, and sent out of phase by the continuous production stops caused by the exacerbation of Covid-19 infections. And if there are no chips, there are no smartphones or cars, and this explains the paralysis of several production segments. The hope is that the signal from Qualcomm, which may unveil the Snapdragon 898 slightly ahead of 2020, may herald a slow but gradual return to normalcy.
Snapdragon 898, when it arrives
That the Snapdragon 898 is set to come out during Qualcomm's 2021 Tech Summit is all but certain. The slight uncertainty that insists on its unveiling concerns the day of the three on which it will debut the 2022 flagship chip: the event will take place from Nov. 30 to Dec. 2, and in the past Qualcomm has announced its best chip with its doors barely open.
If events were to follow those of last year then, the Snapdragon 898 will come out on November 30, which is two days earlier than the Snapdragon 888 that was instead announced on December 2, 2020.
Snapdragon 898, what it looks like
The latest rumors draw a pretty accurate portrait of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 898, which will be made using a 4-nanometer manufacturing process (the current Snapdragon 888 is 5nm). Its flagship will be the Prime core based on the ARM Cortex-X2 architecture, and it really promises to be a powerhouse thanks to its 3 GHz maximum frequency; next to it will be three mid-range cores based on the ARM Cortex-A710 architecture with a 2.5 GHz clock frequency; lastly, to handle less demanding tasks without consuming excessive amounts of power, there will be four cores based on the ARM Cortex-A510 architecture with a 1.79 GHz clock.
There's a good chance that next year's flagship chips will share rather similar architectures, so the performance difference between the various proposals will be mainly entrusted to the GPU, which in the case of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 898 will be the Adreno 730, on whose specifications, however, there is still secrecy.
It should not lack in performance, since the Snapdragon 898 will be called to keep up with the Samsung Exynos 2200 chip that, having a GPU developed in collaboration with the men of AMD, promises to be a very uncomfortable competitor. Qualcomm won't want to be outdone, so Snapdragon 898's Adreno 730 GPU will certainly be just as powerful. Then there's a third wheel that could surprise everyone this year: it's the MediaTek Dimensity 2000.