Tag: LTE Cat18

Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset will Be Available in 2018

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 845, a new high-end chipset for smartphones, tablets, notebooks and other mobile devices. The successor to the Snapdragon 835 comes with improved processor performance, a faster modem and a better graphics unit. It is expected that the Snapdragon 845 will be used in various flagship smartphones with Android OS from 2018, for example, in devices such as the LG G7 or the Samsung Galaxy S9.

Octa-core processor

The heart of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 is an octa-core processor. This consists of two quad-core processors, each with up to 1.8 GHz or 2.8 GHz clock power. The associated main memory is clocked up to 1866 MHz (Dual Channel LPDDR4x). The performance should be well above that of the predecessor Snapdragon 835, so the chipset now supports, for example, the encoding or decoding of videos with 2160p resolution at 60 fps and 10-bit color depth in H.265 format.

 

LTE Cat18: Modem for up to 1.2 GBit/s

Of course, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 also has an integrated modem. While the predecessor Snapdragon X16 modem with LTE Cat16 installed, the Snapdragon 845 is now the Snapdragon X20 modem with LTE Cat18 on board. The maximum LTE speed is 1.2 Gigabit per second in the downlink and 150 MBit/s in the uplink (UL Cat13). The downlink supports 5CC CA, which is a fivefold channel bundling. In addition, the modem can downlink the 256QAM modulation as well as 4 × 4 MIMO on up to three carriers simultaneously. A maximum of 2CC carrier aggregation is possible in the uplink, and 64QAM modulation is also available here.

 

Of course, the speeds that can be reached on the end device depend not only on the modem but also on the mobile network. In many countries, few providers currently offer 1.2 GBit/s in its LTE network.

Snapdragon 845: more features

Other features of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 include display resolutions of up to 4K Ultra HD, both on the integrated display and on a possible external display. As a graphics processor, an Adreno 630 is used, compared to the Adreno 540 from the Snapdragon 835. In addition, the chipset offers native support for biometric authentication as well as secure mobile payment.

 

Huawei Presents HiSilicon Kirin 970 LTE Cat18 Chipset

Huawei presented a new chipset for smartphones at the IFA with the HiSilicon Kirin 970. The Kirin 970 includes a processor, a graphics unit and a mobile radio modem. Especially in the modem, there is some progress compared to the predecessor – the Kirin 960. The Kirin 970 LTE Cat18 supports up to 1.2 GBit/s in the download. In addition, the dual SIM operation supports LTE on both SIM cards at the same time. The Kirin 970 chipset will be used in the Huawei Mate 10 smartphone, which will be presented in mid-October in Munich.

Modern LTE modem

The HiSilicon Kirin 970 is next to the first modem Qualcomm Snapdragon X20, which supports LTE category 18 of the downlink . Thus, speeds of up to 1.2 gigabits per second are possible in a correspondingly developed mobile radio network.

To achieve such high speeds, different 4.5G/LTE Advanced Pro technologies are combined. The Kirin 970 supports, for example, the 4 × 4 MIMO antenna technology and the 256QAM modulation technology. Furthermore, a frequency spectrum of up to 100 MHz can be bundled thanks to the 5CC CA (= five-factor carrier aggregation ).

There is also news about Dual SIM. So far, no smartphone was able to use both SIM slots on LTE at the same time. One of the two cards was therefore always limited to 2G / 3G usage, which is particularly annoying if only an LTE network is available. The Kirin 970 can now also run parallel in the LTE network on both SIM cards, so you can, for example, use the first SIM card to surf via LTE and use the VoLTE in the LTE network via the second card.

Processor, graphics and AI

The HiSilicon Kirin 970 is produced in the 10nm process and is to enable a better battery life than the previous model. An octa-core CPU and a 12-core GPU are integrated in addition to the described modem. The chipset should be particularly suitable for artificial intelligence applications (AI) and be faster and 50x more efficient than a classic quad-core CPU without a AI component through a combination of on-device AI and Cloud AI 25x.