Qualcomm just conducted its annual summit yesterday and it seems like we’ll be seeing 3 new processors for smartphones in the upcoming year. The new, freshly teased, mobile CPUs happen to be the flagship powering Snapdragon 865, the budget friendly Snapdragon 765, and the gaming oriented Snapdragon 765G.
Now, for those of you who are not into mobile processors. Qualcomm has been making CPUs for smartphones, primarily Android devices for a couple of years now. Over that time, their technology has gotten more sophisticated to the point where almost all the recent Android flagships use their latest Snapdragon 855/855+ chipsets to power them.
Qualcomm’s main rivals include Apple with its A-series chipsets found in the iPhones, Huawei with its HiSilicon Kirin chips and even Samsung with its Exynos counterparts. While the benchmark results may vary from device to device, we can safely say that Qualcomm processors have made a steady ground for themselves.
That being said, back to the upcoming processors. The Snapdragon 865 will be the successor to the current Snapdragon 855. It will be paired with Qualcomm’s own X55 modem which will be the successor to the X50 modem currently used in flagships. This means that we’ll be seeing more 5G enabled smartphones in the upcoming year with more efficient connection speeds.
The Snapdragon 765, as mentioned earlier, will be made to power budget/midrange Android smartphones that don’t make it to the flagship category. As you may have guessed, they won’t offer that much performance especially after a longer period of time. The Snapdragon 765G is the 765 turned up a notch for gaming. Think of it as what the Snapdragon 855+ was to the 855. We know that both these will have 5G capabilities but Qualcomm still hasn’t announced what modem these will be using.
Apart from these processors, we got another announcement. This time it was related to Fingerprint sensors. For the year 2020, Qualcomm will be releasing its new 3D Sonic Max in-display fingerprint sensor. In case you didn’t know, this will be the successor to Qualcomm’s current 3D Sonic fingerprint sensor used in the Samsung Galaxy S10 and Note 10 series. It is better known as the Ultrasonic fingerprint scanner because of the technology it used.
Since the previous 3D Sonic sensor was one of the most secure sensors out there, we can expect the 3D Sonic Max to even improve on it more. The new sensor will cover a larger area of the display which might allow users to register and unlock their phones by scanning two fingers simultaneously. We can also expect the general accuracy of the sensor to be improved as well.
This is all that we currently know about Qualcomm’s game plan for 2020. Do note that the summit will go on for a few more days. Yesterday was just the first day and this is what was announced. As the summit progresses, we will find out more. Stay tuned for more updates regarding Qualcomm and its upcoming products.