Honor, which is recently fully separated from former parent company Huawei, has announced a partnership with Qualcomm, and that the new Snapdragon 778G will debut on the new Honor 50 Flagship phone. This is an important revelation as before now, Honor had been under the same political restrictions as Huawei, meaning no chips from Qualcomm and no software from Google, now that they are separate, this changes.
The Snapdragon 778G is, for all intents and purposes, a snapdragon 780G, but instead of being made on Samsung’s 5nm LPE, it’s being built on TSMC’s 6nm N6 node, the rest of the core configuration is the same, so a Prime Cortex A78 core at 2.4Ghz, 3 more Cortex A78s at 2.2Ghz, and a quartet of Cortex A55 cores at 1.9Ghz. The Adreno 642 is now the 642L, not sure what the L means, maybe lower power? We aren’t told. But the Wifi modem, 5G radio and others are identical, this is effectively a 780G made by TSMC on N6, which is great news and will hopefully allow Qualcomm to effectively dual-source this chip without many of the issues associated with dual sourcing chips.
Qualcomm and Honor talk about how glad they are that Honor is able to once again interact with the global supply chain and having someone as committed at Honor to improving mobile is imperative to not stagnate. Whilst this news is fantastic, arguably more so is the news that new Honor devices will once again be able to load the Google mobile services onto them, meaning the issues that plagued the last generation or two or Huawei flagships won’t happen for Honor anymore, the full suite of Google support.
George Zhao, Honor’s CEO also had this to say about working with Qualcomm, which I think is a great way to start again.