It’s only been a month since Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 888 Plus SoC, but rumors for the company’s next flagship chipset, presumably the Snapdragon 898, have already started pouring in. Notably, Snapdragon 898 was previously tipped to arrive as Snapdragon 895.
Snapdragon 898 Leak
Tipster Ice Universe took to Weibo (via Mydrivers) to leak the key specifications of the Snapdragon 898 chipset. According to the tipster, the Snapdragon 898 chipset’s new X2 core will be clocked at 3.09GHz. To put that in perspective, the Corex X1 core in Snapdragon 888+ is clocked at 2.995GHz. According to Arm’s announcement from May, the new X2 core is 16 percent faster than the X1 core.
Based on leaks and rumors so far, the chipset is likely to offer a single Cortex-X2 core, 3 Cortex-A710 cores, 2 high-frequency Cortex-A510 cores, and 2 low-frequency Cortex-A510 cores. The chipset is believed to have scored 1250 points in single-core and 4000 in multi-core on Geekbench. This is a noticeable improvement over the benchmark score of the current-gen flagship Snapdragon 888, but it is unlikely to surpass Apple’s next chipset.
Snapdragon 898 chipset is speculated to be built in Samsung’s 4nm process. But, it’s in the air that Qualcomm may shift to TSMC’s 4nm process by the second half of next year, probably with the ‘+’ variant of the chipset.
Going by Qualcomm’s history of launching flagship chipsets, we expect the company to unveil the Snapdragon 898 sometime in December later this year. Regardless of what Qualcomm ends up naming the chipset, it will power most of the flagship phones from Samsung, Xiaomi, Realme, and others in the first half of 2022.
