Before we know it, 2022 is coming to an end. That means a new wave of smartphones powered by the new Qualcomm silicon platform is on the horizon. Many of the next-gen flagship devices coming next year could work with Qualcomm’s latest mobile platform, his just-announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The usual set of performance and efficiency enhancements. Qualcomm has also changed his CPU core configuration this time to power new apps while maintaining support for older apps.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 CPU and GPU resources are enhanced across the board
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is still an octa-core chip, but with a re-arranged CPU island. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 featured a prime core, 3 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores (a fairly typical layout), but the Gen 2 moves to a 1+2+2+3 setup. There is still one main core on the menu, the Cortex X3 clocking a high 3.2 GHz for better single-threaded performance. The low-power cores are the same Cortex-A510 we saw in his Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 last year, but now there are three instead of four.
The four performance cores are split into pairs, two of which are Cortex-A710 and two of which are Cortex-A715. All of these cores are clocked up to 2.8 GHz, but there’s a reason for the duality. A710 is the latest core to run 32-bit native apps, and there are still some regions (such as China) that require 32-bit apps. Overall, Qualcomm claims 40% more power efficiency with this setup while maintaining optimal compatibility and improving overall performance.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Expected Performance Increase
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 also brings a refreshed Adreno GPU to the party, promising a 25% performance boost compared to the Gen 1. Games that can benefit from Vulkan 1.3 support should see as much as a 30% improvement.
This new chip adds hardware ray-tracing support for more realistic in-game lighting and reflection effects, and adds first mobile-optimized support for Unreal Engine 5 Metahumans Framework.
Update, 11/16/22: The company provided a working and in-game live demo of hardware-accelerated ray tracing on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 prototype phone…
Qualcomm also highlights AI enhancements in the new processor. While the generational machine learning improvements typically seen in mobile his chipsets are significant, this only becomes important in certain use cases. So while Qualcomm claims he has a 4.35x improvement in AI performance, power efficiency is arguably more important, as he has a 60% improvement. Qualcomm says you can expect faster natural language processing and new camera features when paired with a “cognitive ISP.”
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 uses neural networks to recognize faces, clothing, and other objects in the scene. Therefore, images can be automatically enhanced, even at ultra-high resolutions. Case in point, Samsung’s new 200MP ISOCELL HP3 image sensor is optimized for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform. This is also the first of his Snapdragon chips to support the AV1 codec, as Intel and NVIDIA have offered in their recent Arc and GeForce desktop GPUs.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 – Enhanced 5G performance with Wi-Fi 7 and serious bandwidth
Of course, this wouldn’t be the flagship Snapdragon chip without best-in-class connectivity. The new X70 modem can utilize what Qualcomm calls a “5G AI processor” to run two of his 5G SIMs simultaneously. 2×2 MIMO for mmWave and 4×4 MIMO for sub-6GHz, supporting up to 10 Gbps down and 3.5 Gbps up. Qualcomm claims that this is also the first mobile his chip to support Wi-Fi 7, but after the recent announcement he said MediaTek may object to that characterization. Either way, Qualcomm seems to have the upper hand when it comes to shipping devices here in the US.
Qualcomm hopes to see the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in devices from OEMs like Asus ROG, OnePlus and Motorola. Samsung is clearly off the list, but we expect him to rely on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in many regions. Qualcomm usually leaves its own announcements to Samsung. The Galaxy S23 isn’t expected for him until early 2023, but the first phones powered by the 8th Gen 2 He will start appearing at the end of 2022.
