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Qualcomm Lays Out Snapdragon Roadmap in Balmy Maui
At its annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui last week, Qualcomm showed off mobile processor silicon advances on a number of fronts. To the relief of attending analysts, the schedule was not over-packed, and those of us from the frigid North had time to savor the fine weather.
Like other chipmakers, Qualcomm is diversifying its portfolio, tweaking variants of primary designs with custom spins optimized for specific applications. First out of the gate at the summit was the Snapdragon 865, referred to affectionately as “The Beast” by Alex Katouzian, SVP and GM of mobile products at Qualcomm. Katouzian touted the “desktop-level features” of the new part, citing its 15-trillion-operations-per-second processing power and 2-gigapixel-per-second camera, which can deliver 8K video at 30 frames per second. The 865 is designed for a world of artificial intelligence (AI) — with a range of scalar, vector, and matrix computation abilities — and 5G communications — which is handled by the X55 5G modem. For now, the X55 is a separate package, but future versions are likely to include the two on a single system-on-a-chip (SoC). The 865 will be executed in the 7nm silicon process node.
Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm’s president, projected that, although the company expects to see continuing health in the smartphone market for Snapdragon, new growth will come…
