JANUARY 2021 PCWorld 27percent at games
running at 60 fps,
Dave Durnil,
Qualcomm’s
senior director of
engineering and
head of gaming,
explained. It’s all
geared to the
mobile e-sports
community, and
the estimated 2.6
billion mobile
gamers around the world.
AI
AI continues to be one of the more abstract
functions within a desktop and a mobile
processor, and the 6th-gen AI Engine’s
improvements within the Snapdragon 888’s
Hexagon 780 processor seem abstract as well.
Qualcomm claims that the engine now supplies
up to 26 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
“That is more than any other product out there,
and it is basically the biggest leap for
Snapdragon year over year from an AI capability
perspective,” Asghar said.
By placing the scalar, tensor, and vector
accelerators next to one another, the workloads
can be shared among them. This helps the
888’s scalar performance improve by 50
percent, Asghar said. AI-powered functions,
such as those processed by the Adreno 660
GPU, are accelerated by 43 percent. The
Hexagon DSP also works in concert with what
Qualcomm calls the 2nd generation Qualcomm
Sensing Hub, which integrates a dedicated
low-power AI processor to enable use cases like
screen wake, and senses whether your fingers
are truly interacting with the smartphone and its
display, or are just idly brushing them. Put
another way, the phone can also detect whether
you’re in a quiet room or a busy airport, and
adjust the ringer volume together.
Qualcomm also showed off a demo from
Trinamic, a division of BASF, that could even
use your phone’s sensors to examine and
analyze your skin, and detect which skin
product to use that day.
Last year, Qualcomm announced the 765G
and 765, too, providing a reduced subset of
features for a lower price. Qualcomm hasn’t
announced these lower-powered processors
for more affordable smartphones. We’d expect
to see those soon.