WAILEA, Hawaii—Qualcomm today confirmed that its next Snapdragon chipset—which will be used in many of next year's first-generation 5G phones—will be called the Snapdragon 855 and support integrated fingerprint readers under displays.

The 855 will have three times the AI performance of the Snapdragon 845 and an image signal processor (ISP) devoted to computer vision, according to Alex Katouzian, SVP and general manager for mobile at Qualcomm.

Qualcomm's new chip will go up against several competitiors worldwide, but in the US, it's mostly going up against Apple. Various probably unreliable leaked benchmarks show that the 855 (which blogs were misnaming as the 8150) has considerably faster base CPU performance, although it may not beat Apple's existing A12 on raw CPU benchmarks.

For a few years now, though, Qualcomm has been downplaying CPU benchmarks in favor of its vision of heterogeneous computing—developing custom sub-processors to take care of specific tasks. From today's announcements, it looks like Qualcomm thinks that next year is going to be heavily about augmented reality and image processing.

Abroad, Samsung's Exynos 9820 will power some foreign Galaxy S10 units, while Huawei has said its existing Kirin 980 processor (currently seen in the Huawei Mate 20) will power 5G phones in mid-2019.

Giving the Finger to Notches?

Qualcomm's ultrasonic fingerprint sensor is a new version of an idea we've seen the company demo since 2015. Qualcomm says it's superior to the optical under-display sensors that OnePlus and Vivo are currently using because it's faster, more accurate, and works with wet or dirty fingers.

This won't be the end of "notches" on smartphone displays, though. While Apple's original iPhone X notch is there to allow for Face ID cameras, other phones like the OnePlus 6T have to use a notch just to allow for the selfie camera.

Also, phone makers have to take up Qualcomm's solution. The first version of SenseID only appeared in one phone we know of, by LeTV, a boom-and-bust Chinese firm that doesn't seem to be making new phones any more. Last year, Qualcomm showed us a cool 3D depth-sensing camera module that could outpace Apple's Face ID, except that we didn't see the part appear in any US. phones.

We'll hear a lot more about the Snapdragon 855 tomorrow at Qualcomm's Snapdagon Summit, as the whole day is devoted to the 855. We'll keep you updated.