Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, a SoC for motorize the high-end of the next generation of mobiles and which promises improvements in processing and graphics performance, energy efficiency, cameras, support for the latest standards, new features such as ray tracing and advances in AI capabilities.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will be Qualcomm’s most advanced mobile chipset for the start of 2023. Or what is the same, the best mobile engine if we except the custom developments that manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung or Google produce in increasing quantities . It will be available at the end of 2022 and curiously, Qualcomm does not mention Samsung in its list of first customers, which feeds the reports that Samsung wants to boost its Exynos platform.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 features
This SoC will be manufactured by the TSMC foundrie in technological processes of 4nm. It includes CPU, GPU, drivers, IA and camera processor, and the entire chipset set in the same package.
Its main processor is a ARM with 8 physical cores which according to the manufacturer will increase performance by 35% over the current Gen1.
- 1 Cortex-X3 at 3.2GHz.
- 2 cores for performance tasks Cortex-A715 at 2.8 GHz.
- 2 cores for performance tasks Cortex-A710 at 2.8 GHz.
- 3 cores for efficient tasks with frequencies of 2 GHz.
As for the graphic section, Qualcomm says that the new Adreno will improve performance by 25%. It also announces improvements in other areas such as an increase of up to 4.35 times the performance of AI, as well as 60% more performance per watt for sustained AI tasks and an improvement of up to 40% in energy efficiency, a section that as you know is very important on mobile devices.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 supports screens with native resolutions from FHD to 4K at 60 Hz, going through a QHD+ with a refresh rate of 144 Hz. Also improved the capacity of the cameraswith sensors up to 200 megapixels and support for recording video up to 8K HDR and 10-bit HDR.
Qualcomm is also advancing support for next-generation standards such as wireless standards, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.3. Of course, it supports fifth generation mobile networks with the modem. Snapdragon X70 5Gwhich has support for dual-SIM, dual-active capabilities for use with two 5G networks at the same time or a 5G network plus a 4G network.
Finally, note that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the first Qualcomm chip to support the AV1 video codec for 8K HDR video playback at up to 60 frames per second. And it is also the first one that has support for hardware accelerated ray tracing for real-time lighting effects in mobile games.
The chipset will be released at the end of 2022 in the most powerful smartphones on the market from the usual manufacturers that work with Qualcomm. More information | Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform
