- [Daniel] This week at Computex, Microsoft and Qualcomm
are announcing the Snapdragon 850, today I'll tell
you what it means for Windows 10, stay tuned.
(electronic music)
So on a recent episode of Ask Dan someone asked me, will
there be a Snapdragon 845 for Windows 10 on ARM and I said
no, and I wasn't lying, that's because they're skipping it
and they're going to Snapdragon 850, which is a whole new
thing that a lot of people are not expecting.
And what's the big deal about it, well this is the first
chip that's actually made for Windows 10 that's also ARM
based, so this is not gonna be found ever in smart phones.
I want to make that absolutely clear, this chip is made for
Windows 10 devices, specifically computing devices and
that's one of the changes there.
There's now a new name, it's called Mobile Compute Platform
and its running the Qualcomm Snapdragon system.
And I think it's an important distinction, Mobile Compute
is different than Mobile PC, I think that's because we're
going to start to see new foreign factory devices coming
out, in fact Qualcomm said as much
during their press event for this new chip.
So we can also probably read into that a little bit, yes we
are expecting Snapdragon 850 to be found in the new
Andromeda device, in fact one of our insiders told us it was
originally called a Snapdragon 845 S,
but it later became Snapdragon 850.
Alright so what is a Snapdragon 850?
Well it's a second generation, 10 nanometer chip set
from Qualcomm that's mobile based.
Now, what's the difference between it and say the 845?
There's not a lot that we know about the exact architecture,
but what we can tell you is a few things about it, first of
all this is optimized for larger devices that run Windows
10, specifically how the cores operate
and balance the operating system.
Before we were using a Snapdragon 835, in fact in this
device in front of me is running that, this is a straight up
mobile processor from phones.
What's been done now is Microsoft and Qualcomm have worked
more closely together to optimize this chip for
newer hardware and Windows 10.
So the way it balances the operating system and apps is
gonna work better with this chip than say a Snapdragon 845.
Related to all this, Qualcomm did some of their own market
research and they've shown that 22% more people this year
are willing to pay for LTE on
mobile devices like PCs, versus in 2017.
Likewise 27% more want a PC with 20 hours
of battery life or more versus in 2017.
So we are seeing growing desire and momentum for these
types of devices and that's what the
Snapdragon 850 is going to help answer.
One of those changes is going to be the modem so we're
going from an X16 to an X20 modem and that's gonna improve
speeds from a one point gigabit per second to one point two
gigabits per second which is kind of insane for a mobile
device and still kind of theoretical for most of us,
but all you need to know is this is gonna be a better modem.
Knowing that, it will work with more carriers worldwide,
so this is gonna have better and easier certification
to get these devices on many networks
compared to last years X16 modem.
When it comes to graphics there's also the new Kryo 835
graphics processor on this chip and that's gonna be bumped
from 2.6 gigahertz up to 2.95
gigahertz so yes we'll see a performance increase there for
graphics which is gonna be super
important for Windows 10 devices.
I should also mention I asked Qualcomm and yes this chip
supports multiple displays so you can run a second display
off of it which, I don't know, theoretically may be
interesting for a device that had two displays,
just throwing it out there,
they wouldn't say more about that.
Other new features with this chip set, is gonna be support
for Microsoft AI and machine learning so you may have heard
about some of this at Microsoft's build conference a few
months ago, AI is gonna be a big deal in the coming years
and one aspect of that is making hardware that handles AI
specifically instead of letting the main cores run AI
specific tasks, you put it on a secondary chip and that's
what this chip set basically has,
is dedicated hardware for AI.
Now out the gate we won't see a lot of new AI stuff but
developers will be able to create new tools using
Microsoft's machine learning algorithms and take advantage
of that hardware with this device.
Now in real-world consequences what we expect for this are
things like improved grammar checkers or photo editing apps
that can smartly look at what's going on in the image and
correct it, same thing with video editing, this is where
machine learning is going to start to come into our lives
and actually be a real instance
of AI making our lives better.
We'll have to wait a little while for that to happen,
you just need to know that
this chip set supports all of that.
Another change is gonna be with entertainment so, we already
had devices that can support 4K playback but 4K video
capture was always strange,
in fact that Snapdragon 835 is
kinda wishy washy on this even for Android devices
which all don't support 4K capture.
Well that's gonna be kind of fixed here for the Snapdragon
850, so whatever device your gonna be using will be able to
support 4K capture out the gate.
You'll also have improved audio with new aptX HD Codex
support and in Qualcomm's new ak-tistic, auk-tis,
I can't pronounce their new audio algorithm, All I need to
know is it's gonna be improved audio that's gonna be
equivalent to something like what
Dolby does with their devices.
Alright so let's take it all in, so the Snapdragon 850
when you can expect it?
I'm sure that's what you're wondering, so we're hearing it's
gonna be around the holiday season of 2018.
So expect it around November, December and that also
coincides with when we're expecting Andromeda to launch
but whether that actually happens,
well that remains to be seen as always.
What we can tell you is there will be many new devices
coming out with the Snapdragon 850, in fact we expect a few
here at Computex to be shown but you won't be able to get
those until later this year.
So if you've got a Snapdragon 835 device like me,
well you're still good for at least the rest of 2018.
This is very exciting though, this is the first instance of
Qualcomm teaming up with Microsoft for the long haul and
making a very specific chip just for Windows 10 devices.
So this should answer all the questions that people have
whether or not Qualcomm and Microsoft are actually
committed to Windows 10 and ARM, I think they are.
So if you want more information about the Qualcomm
Snapdragon 850 and what it means for Windows 10,
well you can go to Windows Central, we'll have more
information there as well as more info from Computex
over the coming days, you can also subscribe to this
channel, we'll be covering this topic a lot more over
the coming weeks and months, so make sure you do that.
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thanks for watching, take care everybody.