Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 845, its latest high-end mobile processor, at its annual technology summit on December 6. The chip, which retains the same 10nm footprint as its predecessor, is believed to be on board the Chinese, North American and South American variant of the upcoming Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+.
That's not to mean Qualcomm hasn't made any improvements, though. The Snapdragon 845 features an all-new architecture, bringing a number of new features to the table, including 4K HDR video capture. There's also a strong focus on AI processing, as well as a slew of performance and power-consumption upgrades.
- 4K HDR – 60 frames per second
- Full HD – 240 frames per second
- HD slo-mo – 40 frames per second
It's also worth noting that the Snapdragon 845 utilises the chipmaker's latest gigabit LTE and Wi-Fi modems for connectivity. In addition, the new integrated Adreno 630 GPU provides 30 percent better graphics, 30 percent better power efficiency and can map rooms in real time for AR and VR applications, according to The Verge.
The pièce de résistance, however, is the unit's ability to offer a background blur effect (bokeh) for images without a secondary camera sensor, thanks to machine learning—so it's seems even more likely that the Galaxy S9 will come with a single-sensor configuration, while the Galaxy S9+ should feature a dual-sensor setup.
Related: Could this feature make up for a single rear camera on the Galaxy S9?
Galaxy S9 will feature an Exynos 9810 in Europe
The European variant of the Galaxy S9 is widely-rumoured to feature Samsung's upcoming Exynos 9810 processor, which is expected to be built using the same process of the Snapdragon 845—and that makes sense seeing as the firm's manufacturing subsidiary has been commissioned to build the chip for Qualcomm.
