Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, recently announced an immersive multimedia experiences platform, Snapdragon 845, which features “eXtended reality (XR), on-device artificial intelligence (AI), lightning-fast connectivity, and introduces our new secure processing unit (SPU) delivering vault-like security for premium, flagship mobile devices.” Snapdragon 845 will be available and shipped with devices in early 2018.
The Snapdragon 845 platform will enable capture cinema-grade videos. One of the Snapdragon 845’s cinematic feature, a mobile industry first, includes 10-bit color depth for over one billion shades of colors that can be displayed and the wide Rec. 2020 gamut for amazing 4K/Ultra HD videos.
The new Adreno 630 visual processing subsystem architecture allows new XR experiences that span virtual, augmented and mixed reality for an immersive and intuitive experience in entertainment, education and social interaction. Features such as room-scale 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) are part of the package as well. Another interesting component is Adreno foveation,
“which substantially reduces power consumption, improves visual quality and boosts XR application performance, as compared to the previous generation.”
In the area of AI, the Snapdragon 845 features an impressive 3x improvement in overall AI performance of the prior generation:
“transforming your mobile device into the ultimate personal assistant; simplifying how you take pictures and videos; enhancing your VR games, and making voice interaction natural.”
Voice-driven smart assistants are improved with always-on keyword detection and ultra-low-power voice processing. Along with current support for Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s Caffe/Caffe2 frameworks, the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (NPE) SDK also supports Tensorflow Lite and the new Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX).
On the cybersecurity realm, hardware isolated subsystem called the secure processing unit (SPU), which essentially is used to “add vault-like characteristics to existing layers of Qualcomm Technologies’ mobile security solutions.” This technology is used for authentication biometrics security and data key management information encryption.
The Snapdragon 845 also features cutting edge mobile LTE, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth wireless features. Lightning-fast connection speeds also mean enhaced features such as the ability to “download a 3GB movie in less than 3 minutes, and access cloud based large files or apps more quickly than those stored in their phones’ memory.
As for performance concerns, the Snapdragon outperforms more than ever with a mobile device with new camera and visual processing architectures. A significant “30 percent power reduction for video capture, games and XR applications compared to the previous generation.”
A 30 percent improvement is also seen in graphics performance and power efficiencies. Yet another 25 percent performance increase is due to the Qualcomm Kryo 385 architecture, built on Arm Cortex technology. This technology results in faster “gaming, application launch times, and performance intensive applications compared to the previous generation.”
Overall the Snapdragon 845 is a definite plus for mobile users:
“The Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform is the next horizon of innovation and is going to transform the way people use their mobile devices to make their lives better.”
