Ladies and gentle men, I introduce to you the latest and the newest Qualcom's processor, the monster that is going to be behind that irresistible smartphone you'll purchase soon, the Snapdragon 845! Its one of a kind and features lots of capabilities. Gaming experience has been taken to a whole new level with the accompanying Adreno graphics Processing Unit (GPU), the Adreno 630!
Snapdragon is a mobile processor produced by Qualcomm making its first debut in 2007 with a more naming convention of QSD8250 series and ran at a maximum operating speed of 1GHZ. Another series was introduced in 2011 called Krait but the two series did not gain popularity though the krait performed marvelously well by allowing the device adjust the speeds of its cores (dual). A more popular series emerged in 2013 and that was the Snapdragon 800. The 800 processor was a huge success for the Qualcomm family that they decided to rename the previous QSD8250 and Krait to 200 and 400 series respectively. As at the end of 2013, prominent mobile producing companies was already running the 800 in their flagship phones and these included Samsung featuring it in their popular Note 3 LTE series both mobile and tablet versions, Asus featuring it in their Padfone X tablet, HP featuring it in their Slate series both tablets and phablets, Google featuring it in their Nexus 5, to mention but a few.
The things that skyrocketed the 800 and subsequent series' popularity was an astonishing graphics performance (which gave rise to the numerous games developed back then in 2013), amazing battery life and mind blowing processing speads. As at 2013, the processor already supported USB 3.0, upload speads of up to 50 Mbps, clock speed of about 2.3 GHz and the amazing GLONASS location technology. But we are talking about the latest of the 800 series and that is the 845 model.
SECURITY
Qualcomm has taken the security of their processor to a whole new level. The latest model of their processor boasts of a security system called the SPU (security processing unit) which is a new technology that acts a secure storage for any saved credentials and or biometric informations. This comes in the form of a piece of silicon on the chip designed specially for this very purpose. This would keep highly sensitive informations secure which is a more needed development as our smartphones house increasingly sensitive informations.
GAMING
The adreno 630 is the most powerful GPU in the smartphone world at the time of composing this write up. Its runnerup adreno 530 powered the likes of Galaxy s7 Edge, HTC U Ultra and many more and the benchmarks of this GPU have always been outstanding. The graphics rendering and the gaming experience Qualcomm says is going to be the future often talked about.
Qualcomm says the adreno 630 has a performace boost of about 25% to the predecessor 540 and 30% increase in battery efficiency. This will play a big part in the virtual reality designs as these upgrades comes with no impacts such as heating. Qualcomm has these words to say about their latest GPU:
Deliver larger-than-life immersive experiences with the Qualcomm® Adreno™ 630 Visual Processing Subsystem (including GPU, VPU and DPU), featuring room-scale 6DoF with SLAM, Adreno Foveation, and significantly improved graphics rendering and video processing compared to the previous generation.
With this i would say phones powered by the Snapdragon 845 is a must have for gamers.
CAMERA
Lots of improvements have been made in the camera section. Qualcomm developed a new technology called Spectra 280. The spectra 280 is an Image Signal Processor (ISP) which they developed from the scratch and it introduces couple of innovations in the video capture options including 60 frame per second video recording at a resolution of up to 16 megapixels, 480 frames per second slow motion video at 720p. The spectra handles also operations related to noise reduction and camera power managment, image stabilization, and many other functions thereby allowing the main processor perform other specialized functions.
XDA-developers
The 840 still maintained the 10-bit High Definition Recorder (HDR) and also a better support for the Rec. 2020 gamut. Whether upcoming smartphones can support all these properties or not, we'll find out soon.
CONNECTIVITY
Increase in details comes with a price. One minute of 4k video could have a memory size of about 700Megabytes. Qualcomm knows this and as a result, many improvements have been made in other to allow easy sharing of high quality contents. The 845 comes with improvement in the wireless fidelity modem and boasts of data speeds of more than a gigabit.
The Wi-Fi was improved with a diversity enhanced 60 GHz 802.11ad for a seemless multi-gigabit coverage with speeds of about 4.6Gbps. The Wi-Fi 802.11ac technology was also integrated in this monster chip with a more advanced features that claims a faster speed of up to 16 times of the 830 with improvements in resource utilization. Hence sharing information would not cause any issue.
CONCLUSION
The 845 is truly an invention to behold and has features that will make enable smartphone producing companies achieve their dreams. It is creativity friendly with lots of enhancements. One of the first smartphone to feature this processor is the Samsung Galaxy S9 which i have already made a review on, you can checkout the review here WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEW SAMSUNG S9. The features pointed out here are just few of the improvements to the processor and one can check the reference reference section for more details.
