Leak: Here's what the Snapdragon 875 could bring to the table

Qualcomm is holding its Snapdragon Summit early next month, where it’s expected to announce the Snapdragon 875 processor. This will be the latest flagship silicon from the company, and is expected to power a slew of high-end phones in 2021.

Now, frequent leaker Digital Chat Station has posted a few apparent specs on Weibo. More specifically, they claim that the Snapdragon 875 will offer one Cortex-X1 CPU core clocked at 2.84Ghz, three Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.42Ghz, and four Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.8Ghz. Check out a machine-translated version of the post below.

The leaker also asserts that the chipset is built on a 5nm process, offers an Adreno 660 GPU, and features improved cache and memory bandwidth. Furthermore, they suggest that while performance is still class-leading, the Snapdragon 875 could be focused on lower power consumption instead.

These apparent specs all fall roughly in line with our expectations, as we anticipate a move to the 5nm process and the adoption of Cortex-X1 and Cortex-A78 CPU cores by Qualcomm. Arm says the Cortex-A78 should deliver 20% more power than the Cortex-A77 thanks to general improvements and the smaller manufacturing process (although the former only enables a 7% boost). However, the Cortex-X1 is set to deliver even greater improvements than the Cortex-A78, potentially narrowing the gap between Qualcomm and Apple’s chipsets.

The chipmaker also previously revealed the X60 modem, and history as well as a couple of LinkedIn entries tells us that the new modem will appear alongside the flagship processor. It remains to be seen whether this will be an integrated solution though, which would theoretically bring better power efficiency.

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