Snapdragon 888 Best But
I’ve only free to try them out for free so hang out until the end hey happy friday this week we’ll talk about how Qualcomm can beat the competition despite having slower chip we’ll talk about how Microsoft is experimenting with bringing android apps to windows and we’ll also talk about Nokia making laptops sort of like every week we also have a brand new technology quiz but this week it’s available both inside the crowd app on android and on the web as well both are linked in the description so happy quizzing and welcome to the friday checkout okay the most important story this week has to be the really mind-boggling snapdragon 888 the newest flagship chip qualcom recently launched.
What about Qualcomm CPU?
I watched the entire one and a half hour event and my mind is well and truly boggled from the 87 minutes of this presentation Qualcomm spent exactly one minute and three seconds talking about its cpu which is to say they basically didn’t talk about it at all the entire rest of the show was 20 plus minute deep dives on their image signal processors all their ai tech their connectivity stack especially around 5G and their gaming suite although there too. They barely mention the actual gpu and its performance at all besides saying how much faster it is the gpu and especially the cpu are the core components of a mobile soc so sweeping them under the rug is a weird choice to say the least it’s kind of like mcdonald’s launching a new menu and in the ads only describing the fries and the coke not really the burger it’s a strange choice and it took me a while to understand what is going on but i actually think it’s a brilliant move see the cpu is pretty much exactly. The kind of predictable year over year upgrade. We were expecting it’s built on a more efficient five nanometer process versus last year’s seven nanometer process and it has a new high performance core called the cortex x1 that will allow for better single core performance than before cool stuff but not exactly groundbreaking as they are pretty much using the standard design straight from arm so competitors like samsung are expected to have the exact same layout on their processors and based on rumors samsung specifically might even have achieved higher clock rates on the same cpu course than qualcom this year so after a very long reason snapdragon processors might be losing their kind of crown as the pure performance champion of the android ecosystem and qualcom specifically pointed out during their keynote not to worry about benchmarks this year. Because maybe their competitors will beat them at that who knows instead what they told us to focus on are things like cameras ai 5g and gaming and to be fair in these areas the company has made huge and really impressive gains their new triple isp for example will allow for much better computational photography and things like capturing 4k videos or high resolution photos from three cameras simultaneously they have a staggering range of ai coprocessors as well as a really advanced software layer on top a dedicated sensing hub that allows devices to monitor noise levels and motion and other things with barely any power consumption their 5g stack is finally fully integrated into the chip itself and appears to be much more advanced than those of the competition and their gaming stack even allows for things like variable rate shading.
Best Performance CPU, GPU & Fram Rate
The fancy trick that allows game developers to render less important parts of a frame in lower resolution to improve performance so their other stuff their fries and coke is actually really impressive this year and it appears to outclass the competition significantly and qualcom is betting big that starting this year they will be able to make consumers as well as device makers care about these things more than about the raw cpu and gpu performance or the buget it’s a risky bet but i don’t think they are entirely wrong taking better photos and having more reliable connectivity is probably a higher priority for most users than having a slightly faster cpu and given that more and more of the really demanding processes like applying filters on top of a video real time or real-time transcription is increasingly offloaded from the main cpu and gpu onto these other dedicated co-processors and software layers we could soon end up in a place where these snapdragon chips will outperform the competition in real world applications even if they score lower in benchmarks nvidia did a similar thing with their graphics cards by not just chasing raw performance. But instead focusing heavily on things like RTX voice their ridiculously good noise cancelling software or cuda for example a special software layer that accelerates specific workloads like machine learning on nvidia cards and they have gotten to a point. Where for many workloads nvidia cards are essentially the only choice regardless of benchmarks and i think qualcom is smartly aiming for a similar outcome okay my one of the week will be project latte which is the name of a rumored project by microsoft that would allow android apps to come to windows 10 including the ability to publish them in the microsoft store this is a rumor from windows central’s.
Zack bowden and while he has a phenomenal track record it is of course not impossible that microsoft abandon the project before it becomes a reality But here is what we know so far app makers will specifically have to package their apps and publish them to the platform and microsoft is expected to run its own android subsystem on windows to actually be able to run the apps similarly to how they are currently allowing users to run a linux subsystem on windows already much like with huawei’s android google play services are of course unlikely to work on windows so many apps that rely on them for things like location security and notification will likely have to make some workarounds if they want to come to windows but other than that the porting of apps is supposedly pretty much drag and drop and this is obviously only a win depending on how good the execution ends up being.
But to be fair microsoft’s execution around bringing linux to windows was pretty spectacular and apparently they’ve been working a this previously with something called project astoria by which i mean bringing android apps to windows 10 and apparently that project went really well and the main reason they canceled it was that it went a little too well and microsoft got a little afraid that people might stop making high quality windows apps if android apps just worked on windows so we’ll just have to wait and see as you might know i actually have an android app of my own called crowd and sure if it’s easy to port. I’d love to have that working on windows why not. But i’d love to hear what android apps you would use if project latte actually became a thing let me know down in the comments and my feel of the week is that the first Nokia branded laptops since 2009 are scheduled to launch in just a couple of days now.
