The Qualcomm Snapdragon 895 will have a greatly upgraded GPU, according to the General Manager of Lenovo China's mobile phone business department, Chen Jin. In the same post, Chen Jin teased the Lenovo Legion 3 Pro, saying that it will maintain some of (machine translated) "the top tuning capabilities in the industry." SM8450 is the codename for the next Qualcomm chipset, widely expected to launch as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 895 towards the end of the year at the company's yearly launch event in Hawaii.

Chen Jin teased the improved GPU performance on the Chinese social media website Weibo. We know that currently, Qualcomm is struggling to meet the demand for its premium-tier Snapdragon 888 chip, so they’ve resorted to launching products like the Snapdragon 860 and 778 in recent months. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still working on their next major chipset. We already know that Qualcomm is working on a new chipset aimed at high-performance laptops after they acquired Nuvia earlier this year, but we don’t expect products based on that design to launch until late next year at the earliest.

We've already heard some of what to expect from famed leaker Evan Blass of @evleaks fame. It seems that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 895 will integrate Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X65 5G modem-RF system. The Snapdragon X65 is the successor to the Snapdragon X60 modem integrated into the Snapdragon 888. The modem is built on a 4nm process, just like the AP. Phones built on the SoC can connect to mmWave or sub-6GHz 5G frequencies on either non-standalone or standalone 5G networks.

The CPU consists of Qualcomm Kryo 780 cores “built on Arm Cortex v9 technology.” The Armv9 architecture was announced earlier this year, and the first CPU designs to be announced using the new technology were the Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710, and Cortex-A510. Thus, we expect the Snapdragon 888’s successor to be using these three CPU core designs, likely in a 1 x 3 x 4 configuration (1X Cortex-X2, 3X-Cortex-A710, 4X Cortex-A510.)

However, what's interesting is that the GPU in the Snapdragon 895 is the Adreno 730, which sounds like a pretty big step up from the Adreno 660 in the Snapdragon 888. While it is impossible to make any judgments purely from the naming alone, it is a pretty large number skip, and Chen Jin is now also teasing the performance of the GPU in the Snapdragon 895. We still don't have any actual technical details, but we expect to learn more in the coming months.

Featured image: Lenovo Legion 2 Pro