We now know that it is a reality for an ARM based chip to power a laptop and have a strong battery at that but we can’t even stray further than saying that the first chip to make this a reality is the Snapdragon 835, which has seen an even better chip replace it called the Snapdragon 845. This has just been announced at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii.
The 845 is not just a numerical iteration as it comes with improvements across the board in Central Processing Unit (CPU), Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Image Signal Processor (ISP) and the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) all of which are infused on a single unit.
The 8-Core ARM based Cortex chips is still built on the 10 nanometer process. 4 of these cores are performance chips clocked at 2.8Ghz and Qualcomm says their clock speeds are 19% better than the 835 while the remaining 4 are efficiency cores clocked up to 1.8Ghz. The redesigned CPU has seen performance increase by 25%, graphics by 30% with the new Adreno 630 GPU. Qualcomm also promises a 2.5X faster display throughput and a 30% better power efficiency plus better connectivity using Qualcomm’s X20 gigabit LTE Modem that can support up to 1.2Gbps speeds scored across the board than last year’s Snapdragon 835.
Big improvements have also been scored with video capturing. The 845 will enable cameras to capture 4K video at 60 frames per second (fps), will shoot slow motion FHD (1080p) at 240fps and HD (720p) video at 480fps.
It doesn’t stop there, The 845 also has a Secure Processing Unit (SPU) to handle encryption, biometric encryption and payments and a will aslo support room scale 6DOF which can map rooms in realtime for a better Augmented and Virtual Reality experience.
The Snapdragon 845 also has TrueWireless Bluetooth 5 that lets a single audio stream broadcast to multiple connected output speakers simultaneously. The Snapdragon 845 is most likely to ship with next year’s Android flagships from Samsung, LG, HTC, Xiaomi, Google among others and is most likely to power Windows laptops too as seen with the 835.
