Qualcomm Tech Summit 2020: Day Two Live Blog (10:00 ET, 15:00 UTC)

09:51AM EST - With day one of Qualcomm's annual summit announcing its new Snapdragon 888 smartphone processor, today is the day where we get all those shiny technical details. Stick with us here at AnandTech from 10am ET to get the information as it is announced through our Live Blog!

09:57AM EST - We're a few minutes from starting

09:58AM EST - Yesterday Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 888, and X60 modem, but didn't go into any of the details we love. That was left for today's keynote presentation

10:00AM EST - Here we go

10:00AM EST - Don McGuire on the virtual stage

10:01AM EST - Snapdragon sets the benchmark for the connected age

10:01AM EST - 888 = Eight Eighty Eight

10:01AM EST - That jacket looks odd

10:01AM EST - Ziad Asghar for the Technical Deep Dive

10:01AM EST - Major upgrade in every respect

10:01AM EST - Culmination of many years of work, thousands of engineers

10:02AM EST - Enhancing the experience of technology in the home to make the smartphone surpass all of them

10:03AM EST - Smartphones outweigh TVs with 4K/8K HDR

10:03AM EST - Amazing camera experience

10:03AM EST - Communicate with people while watching Netflix

10:03AM EST - Smartphones are more versatile than a separate camera

10:03AM EST - AI augmentation

10:03AM EST - multiple feed recording simultaneously

10:03AM EST - Size, weight, AI effects

10:04AM EST - Fiber gateways

10:04AM EST - More bandwidth in a smartphone

10:04AM EST - Fewer dropped calls on 5G

10:04AM EST - Now gaming consoles - the future of gaming is mobile

10:04AM EST - Be on the move and play anywhere

10:04AM EST - 'gaming is a multiplayer activity' - I dispute that. I really do

10:05AM EST - Gaming is very different on the smartphone

10:05AM EST - One device does it all, powered by S888

10:06AM EST - Imaging and best-in-class camera experience is often #1 requirement for a smartphone

10:06AM EST - 1.4 trillion smartphone pictures taken in 2020

10:06AM EST - Most smartphone gamers play 6+ hours a week

10:07AM EST - Mobile gaming is a social norm

10:07AM EST - XR is taking gaming to a new level

10:07AM EST - New virtual worlds

10:07AM EST - AI also augments smartphones

10:07AM EST - operating behind the scenes

10:07AM EST - Voice recognition, navigation assistance, recommendation for sales engines

10:08AM EST - System level optimizations from SoC to modem and Wi-Fi and antenna

10:08AM EST - Qualcomm can connect to any 5G network in the world

10:08AM EST - QuickCharge, Sonic Fingerprint

10:09AM EST - (all parts of the Snapdragon package offering - not every vendor will buy everything in that offering)

10:09AM EST - Audio technologies

10:09AM EST - Working with mobile and audio brands

10:09AM EST - Qualcomm Aqstic Audio

10:10AM EST - form factor innovation for add-ons

10:10AM EST - headphones, watches, headsets

10:10AM EST - AR/VR/XR glasses

10:11AM EST - Most cutting edge technology on S888

10:11AM EST - Connectivity

10:11AM EST - Integrated 5G RF X60 Modem

10:12AM EST - 3rd Gen mmWave + sub6

10:12AM EST - Peak 7.5 Gbps

10:12AM EST - 3 Gbps Upload

10:12AM EST - 5G carrier aggregation across FDD,TDD

10:12AM EST - Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 - Wi-Fi 6/6E with 6 GHz

10:13AM EST - 3.6 Gbps on Wi-Fi

10:13AM EST - 4K QAM, 160 MHz, 4-stream DBS

10:13AM EST - Fastest and most consistent connections

10:13AM EST - Bluetooth 5.2 with dual antenna support

10:13AM EST - Camera

10:13AM EST - Qualcomm powers the most cameras in the world, measured by photos taken

10:13AM EST - Tripling down on the future of photography

10:14AM EST - Capture three different camera streams at once

10:14AM EST - Spectra 580

10:14AM EST - Support Staggered HDR sensors. Computational HDR support

10:14AM EST - 2.7 gigapixel/sec with Spectra 580

10:14AM EST - +35% gen over gen

10:14AM EST - GPU

10:15AM EST - Adreno GPU

10:15AM EST - Shipped over 2.5 billion Adreno GPUs

10:15AM EST - New breed of gaming smartphones

10:15AM EST - Most efficient graphics IP in the industry, and ever

10:15AM EST - Biggest YoY increase ever +35%

10:15AM EST - 20% more power efficient

10:15AM EST - Display enhancements

10:16AM EST - New hardware in display pipeline such as sub-pixel rendering

10:16AM EST - Built on sustained performance

10:16AM EST - Competitors drop off very quickly

10:16AM EST - Working with mobile gaming industry

10:16AM EST - Now AI

10:17AM EST - Qualcomm AI enables 1.5 billion devices

10:17AM EST - AI has outpaced all others in processing demands

10:17AM EST - New Hexagon processor ground-up redesign

10:17AM EST - Scalar, Vector, Tensor all now fused

10:17AM EST - 16x Shared Memory compared to prior product

10:17AM EST - 3x perf/watt, 2x tensor

10:18AM EST - Enabling new use cases on device

10:18AM EST - Now Qualcomm sensor hub

10:18AM EST - 2nd gen this time

10:18AM EST - added dedicated AI processor

10:18AM EST - Low power AI cases

10:18AM EST - Can work on data streams without firing up Hexagon

10:18AM EST - CPU

10:18AM EST - Kryo 680

10:19AM EST - +25% perf, +25% power efficient

10:19AM EST - Cortex X1

10:19AM EST - 1 x 2.84GHz X1 + 3 x 2.4GHz A78 + 4x 1.8 GHz A55

10:19AM EST - CPU built for sustained performance, not just benchmark runs

10:20AM EST - 6th Gen AI engine

10:20AM EST - Combined CPU+GPU+AI = 26 TOPs

10:20AM EST - Redesigned tools

10:20AM EST - Qualcomm AI Engine Direct

10:21AM EST - Now Security

10:21AM EST - New experiences built on secure foundations

10:21AM EST - New technologies

10:21AM EST - Snapdragon with hypervisor support

10:21AM EST - Multi-OS support

10:21AM EST - app isolation

10:22AM EST - Profile support based on hypervisor

10:22AM EST - Work profile, personal profile etc but secure

10:22AM EST - Multi-user as well

10:22AM EST - Apps could also be isolated within a profile

10:23AM EST - Works with Qualcomm Wireless Edge Services. Secure hardware-based attestation

10:24AM EST - Remotely activate chipset and app features

10:24AM EST - Developers can use these services in their apps today

10:24AM EST - Enabling secure remote management

10:24AM EST - Also secure photography

10:25AM EST - New security standard to tell users that a photo is genuine without edit

10:25AM EST - Crypto seal

10:26AM EST - Snapdragon is world first CIA compliant camera system

10:27AM EST - Deeper into the camera subsystem now

10:27AM EST - PJ to the virtual stage

10:28AM EST - Professional quality photo and video

10:28AM EST - Taking multiple images and using the best parts of each

10:28AM EST - Enabling smartphone innovation

10:29AM EST - Using smaller process node and transistor budget to enable 3x ISP units

10:31AM EST - Most flagship smartphones have 3+ cameras with different lenses

10:31AM EST - Triple concurrency enables three cameras to capture 4K HDR at the same time

10:31AM EST - Running all three cameras means that no longer have to guess if a user is going up or down to different cameras

10:32AM EST - 2x64 MP at 60 Hz + 1x28MP at 30 Hz

10:32AM EST - or 120 photos per second at 12 MP

10:33AM EST - Combined with AI

10:33AM EST - Enhanced low light

10:33AM EST - 0.1 lux

10:34AM EST - ISP designed for the image sensors due out 2021

10:35AM EST - Staggered HDR sensors coming out in 2021

10:35AM EST - Separate short, medium, long images at once in HDR

10:35AM EST - Computational HDR requires more than 10-bit precision

10:36AM EST - No longer any tradeoff for enabling HDR

10:36AM EST - 10-bit HEIF support

10:37AM EST - All capture modes supported

10:37AM EST - enabling video chat

10:38AM EST - (but we still need a decent native webcam app that uses these features)

10:39AM EST - S888 will enable 4K at 120 Hz playback

10:39AM EST - (previous generations could record, but not playback)

10:40AM EST - First Qualcomm Spectra with 10th Gen 3A with AI

10:40AM EST - Neural Net focus and exposure

10:41AM EST - designed in virtual reality

10:41AM EST - Shifting the object in focus as you take a video

10:42AM EST - Apps can enable track and zoom automatically using AI

10:43AM EST - AI trained on different categories for various filters

10:43AM EST - Now to gaming on S888

10:43AM EST - Macey Davis

10:44AM EST - Leader in gaming innovation

10:44AM EST - Snapdragon Elite Gaming

10:44AM EST - Ultrasmooth gaming

10:44AM EST - 144 FPS, 10-bit HDR

10:45AM EST - Updateable GPU driver on a per-game basis

10:45AM EST - Forward Rendering

10:45AM EST - Game Color Plus

10:47AM EST - 'Desktop Level Capabilities'

10:47AM EST - Elite Gaming in AR/VR

10:47AM EST - This video shows people sitting around in public playing games. (A) Do people meet friends just to play on their phones (B) Meeting people?

10:48AM EST - Mobile is half of all gaming revenue worldwide

10:48AM EST - More AAA games on mobile than ever before

10:48AM EST - Mobile gaming has exploded despite the global situation

10:49AM EST - Mobile gaming requires predicting performance of smartphone silicon years in advance

10:50AM EST - 2.6 billion mobile gamers worldwide, mostly on Android

10:50AM EST - Console-based cloud gaming

10:50AM EST - enabled by 5G

10:50AM EST - Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on Snapdragon S888

10:51AM EST - Dolby Atmos

10:51AM EST - Lower latency audio with Qualcomm Audio

10:51AM EST - Lower touch latency

10:52AM EST - Pro gamers require quicker reactions

10:52AM EST - Sponsor of PUBG global champs

10:54AM EST - New Qualcomm Game Quick Touch

10:54AM EST - Vertical sync and touch submission resulting in delayed frames

10:54AM EST - This avoids that issue

10:55AM EST - Touch to display improved by 20%

10:55AM EST - Variable Rate Shading

10:56AM EST - Reducing workloads and improving frame rates / resolutions

10:56AM EST - or lowers power consumption for longer game play

10:56AM EST - VRS up to 2x2

10:56AM EST - 40% reduction in pixel shading on average

10:56AM EST - without sacrificing visual fidelity

10:58AM EST - Also allows for parity with desktop and console features

10:59AM EST - Now onto more detail on AI

11:00AM EST - Qualcomm is in use in a lot of the default apps on smartphones today, and social media apps

11:00AM EST - Developsers are at the heart of AI

11:01AM EST - Qualcomm AI Innovation Challenge in China

11:01AM EST - Neural Processing SDK

11:03AM EST - using AI to sense the world around

11:03AM EST - Hexagon 780 has been rearchitected

11:03AM EST - New fused design

11:04AM EST - New fused sensor reduces memory latency between segments

11:04AM EST - Perf/watt up to 3x

11:05AM EST - GPU now supports 4-input mixed precision dot product

11:05AM EST - wave matrix multiplication for FP16/FP32

11:05AM EST - Using AI to remove elements from video

11:06AM EST - (uses third party apps)

11:06AM EST - live background removal in 4K30 video

11:07AM EST - Interesting numbers, doesn't state what batch size though

11:07AM EST - batch 1 is latency focused, batch 64+ is throughput focused

11:07AM EST - Sensing hub is 5x more powerful

11:08AM EST - Less than 1 mA current

11:08AM EST - TensorMicro framework for sensor hub

11:08AM EST - Already can offload 38% of the Hey Google algorithm to the sensor hub

11:09AM EST - Sensor hub can operate when rest of the hardware is basically off

11:09AM EST - Hub can now take data from all sensors simultaneously without muxing

11:09AM EST - e.g. matching ring volume to environment

11:09AM EST - Social media filter suggestions by detecting environment

11:10AM EST - This person is clearly on a raid

11:10AM EST - Using AI to detect what sort of moisturizer you should use after the shower

11:11AM EST - (so using a phone in the bathroom, that's going to go down well)

11:11AM EST - 6th Gen On-device SDK

11:12AM EST - Support for new models, and MS W10 use cases powered by snapdragon

11:12AM EST - Hexagon NN direct

11:13AM EST - New Qualcomm AI Engine Direct provides APIs for full SoC access for AI models

11:13AM EST - CPU/GPU/Hexagon all in one

11:13AM EST - Compatible with S865

11:13AM EST - Focused on modularity and extensibility

11:14AM EST - User defined operators in OpenCL into the SDK

11:15AM EST - tvm with now support Hexagon built with python

11:15AM EST - Sharing contributions with the open source community

11:15AM EST - AI model efficiency toolkit

11:15AM EST - New support for lower quantization

11:16AM EST - Allows maximising power while maintaining accuracy

11:16AM EST - Working directly with Snapchat

11:18AM EST - S888. 5nm

11:19AM EST - Kryo 680 + Adreno 660 + Hexagon 780

11:19AM EST - X60 modem, 5G sub-6 and mmWave

11:22AM EST - S888 improves your experiences, and creates new ones

11:22AM EST - Redefining the premium tier

11:23AM EST - That's a wrap. Next year's event is in Hawaii