Snapdragon 855 Featuring ‘NPU’ Will Enter Production Lines In Q4 2018

A lot of rumors about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 have been doing the rounds for a while. The latest one comes from Taiwan that says the “next-generation Snapdragon 800 series SoC chips” will hit mass production lines in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will be fabricating Qualcomm’s newest processor which is expected to make up for about 8% of TSMC’s total revenues in 2019.

The most exciting aspect of the Snapdragon 855 is its dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). It is said to be at par with the NPU included in Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 970, that was announced at IFA last year.

This would be the first time for Qualcomm to use a dedicated NPU in its upcoming mobile processor. However, companies like Apple and Huawei have already done it.

There are also reports by Roland Quandt from WinFuture that  Qualcomm will also be changing its naming scheme for the upcoming high-end processors.

For now, the chip still carries the codename “Hana,” Quandt reports that it will actually be called Snapdragon 8150 when it hits the market in early 2019.

Snapdragon 855 chipset will be built on a 7nm process to provide better performance, improved battery efficiency and onboard AI processing of course.

While Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 is the hottest stuff for smartphones in 2018, the 855 SoC is already turning heads even before it entered the production lines.

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