Today, Qualcomm detailed its new flagship SoC for 2020: the Snapdragon 865. This is going to be the chip that ships in every single high-end Android phone that comes out in 2020, and there's a lot to go over.

First up: we're getting the usual modest speed increases that Qualcomm delivers every year. Qualcomm says the CPU and GPU are 25-percent faster compared to this year's Snapdragon 855. Like last year, this is an eight core, 7nm chip, but as AnandTech reports, now it's being manufactured on TSMC-improved 7nm "N7P" node, the same manufacturing process used by Apple's A13 SoC.

This year the bigger CPU cores have been upgraded from Qualcomm's Kryo 485 cores in the 855, which were based on ARM's Cortex A76 design, to the new "Kryo 585 CPU," which uses ARM Cortex A77 cores. The frequencies are unchanged from last year: the single "Prime" A77 core is at 2.84GHz, and three other A77 cores are at 2.42GHz. Four Cortex A55s make up the smaller cores for background processing and other lower-power tasks and are clocked at 1.8GHz.

Qualcomm has made a heap of improvements to the camera performance of the 865's new Spectra 480 image signal processor (ISP). The camera co-processor now has a max processing bandwidth of 2 gigapixels per second, allowing for cameras up to 200MP, and video capture modes of 8K at 30fps or 4K at 120fps. High speed is still capped at 960fps at 720P, but you'll be able to record that speed indefinitely now, instead of only in short bursts. Overall, Qualcomm is promising 40-percent better performance out of the camera pipeline.

Qualcomm has been putting more and more emphasis on the Hexagon DSP, which it now calls a "Tensor Accelerator" designed for AI compute tasks written with Google's Tensorflow library. Thanks to this new co-processor, Qualcomm says its "AI Engine" can do four-times as many operations per second as the last year's model.

Given that Qualcomm and Android are the "Wintel" of the mobile world, the Snapdragon 865 also brings a few Android-centric benefits. David Ruddock of Android Police reports that Qualcomm will start providing Snapdragon 865 graphics driver updates through the Play Store, allowing users to update their graphics drivers just as they would an app.

Google has been pushing SoC vendors to do this since Android 8.0 Oreo, which first enabled updatable graphics drivers, but as always, the wider Android ecosystem has shown indifference to keeping consumer software up to date. We'll see. Ruddock suspects that this year the graphics driver update will be a Project Mainline module, which was a new high-permission filetype introduced in Android 10, allowing for modular system components.

Qualcomm also announced that the 865 will be one of the first chips to support Google's new digital driver's license scheme, aka the Android "IdentityCredential APIs" coming in "Android R" (the 2020 version of Android). The idea is that instead of lugging around a dumb plastic card, you could carry state and federally recognized IDs in your smartphone as just another app. We don't have a ton of detail on this yet, but Android code commits found by XDA Developers show the special APIs provide secure storage of a digitally signed identity in accordance with the ISO 18013-5 standard for a "mobile driving license application." Before you run in to the comments to type "What if my battery dies?"—there's a mode that would allow your digital ID to be shown when the battery is too low to boot into the full Android OS. There is even work being done to allow for transferring this information to a police officer without having to unlock your entire phone, so the cops can't start digging through your phone for evidence.

While Google and Qualcomm seem hard at work on the technical aspects of a digital driver's license, this is also a legal issue, and you would need friendly neighborhood governments to be on board with a change like this.