Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 870 reheats the Snapdragon 865 for 2021 phones
- by Nick Cohen
- in Industry
- — Jan 20, 2021
Basically, the chip is a kind of faster version of the Snapdragon 865 used in last year's top smartphones. Basically, Qualcomm continues to market its predecessor with the Snapdragon 870 with a slightly higher clock rate in an otherwise unchanged form.
"Building upon the success of Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus, the new Snapdragon 870 was created to address OEM and mobile industry requirements", Qualcomm vice president Kedar Kondap noted in a prepared statement.
Furthermore, the Snapdragon 870 still uses Kryo 585 cores, which are based on ARM's Cortex-A77 with some in-house tweaks.
If you've ever read about the 865 and the 865 Plus, the 870 should be instantly familiar. Devices featuring both Snapdragon 870 are set to be announced in the coming weeks.
It's essentially a Snapdragon 865 Plus with a clock speed improvement. That's not almost as impressive as the 25%-35% improvements we've seen with the SD888, but it should give manufacturers a slightly cheaper 7nm chipset to fall back on if Qualcomm and Samsung run into supply shortages on the new 5nm Snapdragon 888.
These familiar specs can also be found in the machine learning and camera categories, owing to the presence of the old chip's Hexagon 698 digital signal processor and the Spectra 480 image signal processor (ISP).
Speaking of which, the first phone powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 is tipped to be from Motorola, fueling rumors that the soon-to-be-launched Motorola Edge S won't be based on the Snapdragon 888 but on the Snapdragon 870 instead. The Snapdragon 870 could be more power efficient, though, resulting in longer battery life on devices that would use it.
The Snapdragon 870 supports up to 16GB of either LPDDR5 or LPDDR4x memory. There is 4K video capture and 8K video capture at 8K support as well. The latest chipset comes with Qualcomm's FastConnect 6800 system that offers Wi-Fi 6, with up to 1.8Gbps of speeds and Bluetooth 5.2, with support for Qualcomm's aptX suite for Bluetooth audio.
