I hope Apple is ready for this.... - Snapdragon 888 By ShortCircuit

- This is the ideal me according to the image professionals at Xiaomi. I'm not sure quite how this happened but ahead of the launch of the upcoming Galaxy S21 which is gonna be featuring Snapdragon's new SD 888 chip set. I have gotten my hands on the Xiaomi Mi 11 which is also featuring that same chip set. So even though that other phone is under NDA, I am apparently at liberty to just crack this thing open try it out, run any programs I want on it. So I was not gonna say no to that opportunity. We've got a crummy plastic case.

Really nobody cares about that right now. Let's get this phone cracked open. On the back, it comes with a vegan leather backing material. It's apparently slightly thicker than the regular. I believe it's a glass backed one and it actually feels pretty good.

A little plasticy like it's clearly not regular leather but I'd say it's at least on par with what was it? The Note 2? Interesting idea. Definitely an interesting idea. It's got a 108 megapixel main shooter along with a 13 megapixel Ultrawide and an eight megapixel tel macro, whatever that means. I consulted my photography expert here and Brandon said I don't know, maybe a macro lens with a long throw, is that what you said? - Yeah - Maybe something like that. So I'll have to have a look at that.

It's got an OLED display that has typical maximum brightness of 900 nits and peak brightness of 1500 nits. I'm expecting that to look pretty good for your HDR contents and all of that. And more importantly, it's got a 120 Hz refresh rate for that smoothness and 480 Hz touch polling. So that's one of the things that affects the sort of responsive feeling this of the device a lot. It doesn't look like it's actually at 120 Hz right now though.

So let's go ahead and play around with that here. Yeah, its running at 60 Hz. Interestingly, it does have support for variable refresh rate although I don't know what does or doesn't trigger that because there's no settings in here for what you can do with it. AI image enhancement, super resolution. It's gonna be all kinds of AI features phone manufacturers are gonna be building into this thing.

So let's go through some of the basics of the Snapdragon 888. This model right here is available with either eight or 12 gigabytes of LPDR five memory running at 3,200 megahertz. So the RAM in this thing is probably faster than what you're running in your desktop PC. It's got integrated support for 5G. Now you guys might recall that last generation, you actually had to get this 765G chip set in order to have 5G connectivity integrated into the device without the need for an external chip.

So the flagship chip actually had fewer features than that mid-range ship in a certain manner of thinking. The Snapdragon 888 does away with that completely. So you've got a next gen OctoCore design so that's four high power four low power cores You've got 5G connectivity built in, a new AI engine, new GPU and of course it's built on a five nanometer manufacturing process from TSMC just like Apple's A14 chips that they launched with the iPhone 12 series. What we wanna know is initial impressions of speed. Now back in the old days, we could make significant observations about the performance of a new SOC just based on how the Android interface navigated like how smooth it was.

Nowadays that doesn't really fly 'cause it's already so freaking smooth from generation to generation. that that's just not where\ you're going to notice the difference, but people also have much much more demanding use cases for their phones these days than they used to. So let's start with gaming. Right, here we go. For comparison, we've gone with the ROG phone.

Is this two or three? Whatever the one, the Snapdragon 865 plus processor so this is kind of like a Band 865. Wait a minute. Does this thing not have Android 10? Much time has passed, we did not find the ROG Phone III but that's okay because we did find a Note 20 Ultra. So this is a Snapdragon 865 rather than 865 plus, but that's okay we can live with that. Why don't we kick things off with a good old fashioned Geekbench 5, to be clear I'm not expecting this to be like a night and day performance difference.

Mobile SOCs have already gotten to the point that desktop CPU's did like 10 years ago where it's like, yeah, we're getting improvements but don't expect them to be total game changers from generation to generation. It's gonna finish the whole test, like a solid 5% faster. Wow, including absolutely blowing through the machine learning benchmark. Okay, so single core performance improvement in excess of 10%, like getting dangerously close like 15% and multi-core performance improvement of well over 20. Wow, this is actually pretty huge.

Speech recognition and machine learning both saw enormous improvements. I mean, that's like 40% 45% better on the Snapdragon 888. And then I would expect the same is probably true in a multi-core performance. Actually, that does kind of make sense because it's not like each core has its own machine learning optimized chunk of it. There's actual dedicated machine learning like AI silicon on the die.

Obviously a lot of the way manufacturers utilize these improvements and performance though is not in ways that you, the end user will necessarily notice like swiping around like I said before. So you might see more advanced image processing algorithms, for example. It's not the kind of thing that you can benchmark but you'll have still a responsive phone that is able to take better pictures with more heavy processing on them. So this is our ultra wide angle that is pretty wide It's spec-ed at 135 degrees. Brandon, you look so far away.

(chuckles) Xiaomi claims that their video mode will put Hollywood on notice. So I don't know. It's a built in support for HDR video capture. The difference between the blue of your shirt and the blue of those tiles and the video is not very much. Okay, thank you.

This is a funny one. The sound system is apparently tuned by Harman Kardon which if you guys don't know was acquired by Samsung a little while back. So that's just kind of a weird one to me. Yeah, right? - Whoa hey Colin, can you pop your head around the corner again for a second there? - It actually sounds pretty good. No the jutter that I was seeing in the viewfinder was not present in the recorded video.

So here I can show you guys what I mean as I was panning the camera around you you can probably see it now. It's like really choppy. Can you tell? Yeah, so that is not in the recordings. So it's not great from like a user experience perspective, but, but yeah at least the footage looks fine. This video is brought to you by Manscaped featuring the performance package kit which comes with a ton of stuff.

Their Lawn Mower waterproof trimmer with advanced skin safe technology helps reduce nicks and cuts. Their crop preserver ball deodorant has functionality that I think is fairly self-explanatory. Their Weed Wacker knows that your hair trimmer are perfect for taming your underbrush in delicate areas and their new sheers 2.0 luxury nail kit all included. So head to manscaped. com/circuit and get 20% off plus free international shipping today.

And you'll get their shed travel bag and a pair of anti chafing boxer briefs available for a limited time. There's a few more things I did wanna run through on this puppy, starting with of course it's wireless charging capability so it can do 55 watt, fast wired charging 50 watt wireless charging and then 10 watt reverse charging. if you wanna throw your wireless earphones or whatever on the back of it. In terms of IO, something else didn't cover it all yet. USB type C for charging obviously there's your SIM slot.

It does not have any expandable storage. Over on the left, there's a whole lot of not much. Over on the top, there's a whole lot of not much else. Is that, no way. I think it is.

It looks like an IR blaster on the top. That is freaking cool. And then finally, over on the right you've got your lock button as well as volume up and down. - What a good question Brandon? There was no charger included. Curse you Apple for normalizing this stuff.

Whoa, good job Qualcomm for making a here I was saying incremental blah, blah, blah. that GPU is a mess ton faster. That is crazy. It's like well over 20% faster. Love it.

So bottom line from these first impressions, whether you are into this particular device or not Snapdragon 888 looks extremely promising. A couple of things I didn't mention before, that's a dual SIM tray so it does support putting two SIM cards in there. And then finally I think I just didn't really comment on the display much. It's basically borderless. I think it looks absolutely fantastic.

This included beautification is just Oh man what is it with Chinese phones? And like completely smoothing out people's faces by default. I don't need to look that smooth. This is the ideal me according to the image professionals at Xiaomi. And I think that's, wow I look like a doll. (mumbles) Isn't that scary? Look at that skin.

That's not in my skin at all. Thank you guys for watching. Subscribe to Short circuit, all that good stuff. Hopefully we'll have more coverage of other devices with the Snapdragon 888 processor on the Linus Tech Tips channel and here coming shortly. So make sure you're subscribed to Linus Tech Tips as well.

Source : ShortCircuit