Qualcomm begins sampling upcoming 7nm flagship chipset to OEMs

Amidst a myriad of processor-related news and insights courtesy of Gamescom and Hot Chips 2018, Qualcomm is making a quick announcement of its own: the premiere Android chipset provider has begun sampling of its next-gen flagship mobile platform to multiple OEMs. This means just what you think it means: we can certainly expect Qualcomm’s latest and greatest silicon in next year’s most important releases, as the gears are already in motion.

“We are very pleased to be working with OEMs, operators, infrastructure vendors, and standards

bodies across the world, and are on track to help launch the first 5G mobile hotspots by the end

of 2018, and smartphones using our next-generation mobile platform in the first half of 2019.”

                                                                                    – Cristiano Amon, president, Qualcomm Incorporated

Here’s a quick refresher of key information we’ve gathered from official statements, as well as leaks provided by WinFuture. We know that Qualcomm’s upcoming flagship system-on-chip (which we hesitate to call Snapdragon 855 just yet) will be built on the 7nm process node (reportedly TSMC’s 7FF) for further performance and power efficiency enhancements. It was late last year that the 3GPP finalized the specification for 5G, leaving the next step up to the silicon vendors. We’ve already learned that Samsung has been working on its own 5G modem, and that Qualcomm’s upcoming premium chip would be featured alongside the Snapdragon X50 5G modem (perhaps installed separately for specific 5G devices, according to WinFuture). The next premium Snapdragon platform could also feature a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit), going beyond the AI-centric compute capabilities of the Hexagon DSP and its Hexagon Vector eXtensions.

Knowing that OEMs are already getting their hands on the platform that’ll be at the heart of 2019’s hottest devices isn’t unexpected, but it’s still somewhat reassuring if not exciting. It remains to be seen just which OEMs will be among the first to feature this new processor (Lenovo’s VP promised to provide the world’s first, but we aren’t too confident about that as of yet). Qualcomm states that the full details regarding their next-generation flagship chipset are planned to be announced in the fourth quarter of 2018, most certainly at this year’s Snapdragon Tech Summit where we’ll likely hear about which OEMs will be first in line (similarly to last year’s). We should expect this upcoming chipset to hit consumer devices in the first half of 2019.

Source: Qualcomm

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