On January 14, 2021, Qualcomm Technologies announced that the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 888 5G flagship mobile platform is supporting Samsung’s most advanced new smartphone Samsung Galaxy S21 series, including some regional versions of S21, S21+ and S21 Ultra. Snapdragon 888 integrates industry-leading mobile technology innovations such as 5G, AI, games and imaging, and aims to build flagship mobile terminals into professional cameras, smart personal assistants, and top gaming terminals.

Alex Katouzian, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mobile, Computing and Infrastructure Business of Qualcomm Technologies, said: “We are very pleased to continue our long-term strategic cooperation with Samsung Electronics to bring a series of latest breakthrough mobile The experience is brought to consumers. Some regional versions of the new Samsung Galaxy S21 series, supported by the flagship mobile platform of Snapdragon 888, will further stimulate the infinite possibilities of mobile experience."

KJ Kim, executive vice president and head of the mobile phone research and development department of Samsung Electronics’ mobile communications division, said: “Samsung has been committed to bringing consumers the most innovative mobile experience. The new Galaxy S21 is equipped with the flagship mobile platform of Snapdragon 888 5G. Some regional versions will continue to implement this vision. The new Samsung Galaxy S21 series can support the most advanced 5G connection, terminal-side AI and cutting-edge imaging features."

The Samsung Galaxy S21 series takes full advantage of the main architectural enhancements of Snapdragon 888. Snapdragon 888 uses the latest 5nm process technology and integrates Qualcomm Kryo™ 680 CPU based on Arm Cortex-X1. The overall performance of the CPU is increased by up to 25% compared with the previous generation platform, and it supports a frequency of up to 2.84GHz. Qualcomm Adreno™ 660 GPU has achieved the most significant performance improvement so far, with graphics rendering speed up to 35% higher than the previous generation platform. The overall newly designed sixth-generation Qualcomm AI engine includes the new Qualcomm Hexagon™ 780 processor, which combines AI with professional imaging, top-level games, extremely fast connections and more functions to empower top-level mobile experience. Snapdragon 888 can provide industry-leading AI performance, the performance per watt is 3 times higher than the previous generation platform, and supports 26 trillion operations per second (26 TOPS) powerful computing power.

The Snapdragon X60 5G modem and radio frequency system integrated by Snapdragon 888 is Qualcomm's third-generation modem-to-antenna solution. It supports Sub-6 GHz carrier aggregation and millimeter wave, and can provide the world's fastest commercial 5G network speed up to 7.5Gbps. By supporting almost all major networks in the world, the Snapdragon X60 5G modem and radio frequency system also supports excellent network coverage, including the use of dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) technology to achieve nationwide 5G network coverage.

The Samsung Galaxy S21 series makes full use of the brand new Qualcomm Spectra™ 580 on the Snapdragon 888. The three ISPs supported by it can process 2.7 billion pixels per second and achieve concurrent shooting with three cameras. Snapdragon 888 also supports capturing high-resolution images in ultra-high-speed motion at 120fps, 4K HDR video shooting, and HEIF format photo shooting.

The Samsung Galaxy S21 series also uses the second-generation Qualcomm 3D Sonic sensor, the under-screen fingerprint sensor with the largest recognition area in the current smartphone. The size of the sensor is 8x8mm, which is designed to support the terminal to collect fingerprint images with a larger area than the previous generation solution, thereby enhancing the user experience. Compared with the previous generation, the speed of the Samsung Galaxy S21 series ultrasonic sensor is increased by 30%, and the recognition area is 1.7 times that of the previous generation. Different from other identity authentication solutions, Qualcomm's 3D Sonic sensor uses acoustic-based technology to obtain the unique fingerprint characteristics of each user.