Lenovo exec says Snapdragon 898 GPU will be greatly upgraded

One of the biggest strengths of Qualcomm’s high-end Snapdragon processors (aside from cellular connectivity) is that they tend to offer the best GPU in the Android smartphone space. This generally rings true for the Snapdragon 888, but it would seem that the follow-up chipset might enjoy a major upgrade in this area.

A Lenovo executive claimed on Weibo (h/t: XDA-Developers) that the successor to the Snapdragon 888 chipset will have a “greatly” upgraded GPU, suggesting that the Legion 3 Pro smartphone will use this chipset. Check out the machine-translated screenshot below.

The executive used the “8450” name, which is the part number for the upcoming chipset much like the Snapdragon 888 has the “SM8350” part number and the Snapdragon 865 series is also known as the “SM8250.” So even though we’re not sure whether it’ll be called Snapdragon 898, 895, or something different altogether, we can be sure that this is indeed the Snapdragon 888 successor.

There’s no word on what kind of GPU power boost we’ll see over the current flagship silicon, but Qualcomm wouldn’t be the only mobile chipmaker with a hugely improved GPU. Samsung’s next Exynos flagship chipset will feature AMD graphics, complete with ray tracing and variable rate shading. One rumor points to major benchmark gains over even Apple’s chipsets, but we’ll take this claim with a bag of salt as benchmarks are notoriously easy to spoof.

In any event, the Snapdragon 898 or 895 was previously tipped to offer an Adreno 730 GPU, 4nm design, and a Spectra 680 ISP. The chipset is also expected to offer Arm’s new cores, presumably one heavy-lifting Cortex-X2 core, three Cortex-A710 cores, and four Cortex-A510 cores for lightweight tasks.

Which flagship chipset do you think will have the better GPU in 2022, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 898 or the Samsung Exynos 2200? Let us know via the poll above.