Snapdragon 898 SoC Could Have A Different Name

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 898 chipset will be official soon, with the chipset expected to power a majority of the 2022 Android flagships. A new rumor now suggests that the chip could be known as the “Snapdragon 8 Gen1,” deviating from the company’s usual naming format.

The leak comes courtesy of Ice Universe on Twitter. Despite the new name, the internal codename for the chip is still SM8450, as per recent reports. Since this is only a rumor at this point, we recommend taking this with a grain of salt.

It’s unclear if this name change would apply to Qualcomm’s mid-range and budget CPUs. Perhaps the chip maker wants to effectively differentiate between its mid-tier and high-end SoCs in the market. The new Snapdragon chipset will break cover on November 30 at the Snapdragon Tech Summit 2021.

The upcoming Snapdragon chip will go head-to-head with the Exynos 2200

From what we know so far, the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 (or the 898) would introduce a 20% performance boost from its predecessor while also improving efficiency. It will feature a primary ARM Cortex-X2 CPU core with a clock speed of 3.0 GHz, three Cortex-A710 cores running at 2.5 GHz, and four Cortex-A510 cores at 1.79 GHz.

Meanwhile, the flagship SoC will feature the powerful Adreno 730 GPU. It will also feature the Snapdragon X65 5G modem, capable of a maximum downlink speed of 10 Gbps.

We’ve come across multiple leaks of phones running the new Qualcomm silicon. A recent leak confirmed that a number of manufacturers are already working with the new chip. Xiaomi’s Mi 12 flagship was spotted running the SM8450 chip, and we expect more information to follow in the weeks to come.

Qualcomm’s new SoC will also feature on the Samsung Galaxy S22 series early next year. Last week, the Galaxy S22+ running on the said chipset made an appearance on Geekbench.

Interestingly, the device scored 1,163 on the single-core test and 2,728 on the multi-core test. This is a marginal improvement over the global variant of the Galaxy S22+ with the Exynos 2200 chip.

This model could only score 1,073 and 3,389 in the single and multi-core tests, respectively. Since this data comes from a September report, we expect Samsung to make significant improvements to the Exynos chip ahead of its release.