If you believed that Snapdragon 888 was the only top-of-the-range processor at home Qualcomm for this first half of the year, you were wrong. The American chipmaker doubled down by also pitching Snapdragon 870 5G, another high-end model that we can consider an upgrade of the 865 + launched in the second half of last year.
The intention clearly seems to compete with MediaTek, which will soon announce Dimensity 1200 and which is aiming to conquer that market segment that includes high-end models but not absolute top-of-the-range. The new Snapdragon 870 5G is characterized by the highest clock rate ever in the mobile sector: a whopping 3,2 GHz, which goes above 3,13 GHz of the previous record holder: Huawei's Kirin 9000.
Built at 7 nm, the SoC has an octa-core architecture formed by a CPU Cortex-A77 high performance with 3,2GHz, 3 Cortex-A77 high performance with 2,42GHz and 4 Cortex-A55 low power consumption with 1,8 GHz. The GPU is an Adreno 650, the NPU Hexagon 698 (in combination with the Tensor Accelerator) reaches 26 TOPS and the 5G modem is a Snapdragon X55 that reaches up to 7,5 Gbps with support for sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies.
Qualcomm's chipset, identified by the code SM8250-AC, supports displays up to 1440p @ 144Hz (or 4K @ 60Hz) and the HDR10 + standard. For the photographic part there is a Spectra 480 ISP that supports sensors up to 200 MP, video recording in 8K at 30 fps and 4K at 120 fps, HDR10 + and Dolby Vision.
On the connectivity side we find the FastConnect 6800 system with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, and there are also the aptX Voice and aptX Adaptive technologies. It is already confirmed that we will see Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G on board at least one smartphone OPPO, and among the producers who will adopt it there will also be OnePlus, Xiaomi, iQOO and Motorola. Xiaomi's model seems to be a camera phone, while that of iQOO a gaming phone.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G technical specifications
- Production process: 7nm
- Architecture: octa-core
- CPU: 1x Cortex-A77 @ 3,2 GHz + 3x Cortex-A77 @ 2,42 GHz + 4x Cortex-A55 @ 1,8 GHz
- GPU: Adreno 650
- Modem: Snapdragon X55 5G (sub-6 + mmWave, up to 7,5Gbps)
- Connectivity : FastConnect 6800, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2
- NPU: Hexagon 698
- ISP: Spectra 480
