Qualcomm has finally unveiled its flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. The new chipset is fabricated on a 4nm node and is claimed to have brought in a number of performance improvements over the Gen 1 model.
Qualcomm has claimed that it has partnered with Asus ROG, Honor, iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, Red Magic, Sharp, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi, Meizu, and ZTE to release smartphones powered by its new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. It further states that we will get to see the first phones powered by the chipset be made available before the end of this year.
Performance
Qualcomm claims that it focused on improving power efficiency along with performance. The new Kryo CPU trio delivers a performance boost of up to 35 percent along with an up to 40 percent bump in power efficiency.
The clock speeds remain the same as the previous generation, but the core composition has changed. The single Kryo Prime core based on Cortex-X3 runs at 3.2GHz, it is backed by four performance cores, which run at 2.8GHz. There are also three efficiency cores that run at 2.0GHz.
The chipset comes with support for LP-DDR5X RAM clocked at 4,200MHz. For storage, it supports the new UFS 4.0 format.
Coming to the GPU, the new Adreno GPU is claimed to provide up to 25 percent higher performance with up to 45 percent better power efficiency compared to the previous generation. The company has also added support for hardware accelerated ray tracing. This is also the first GPU to bring support for Vulkan 1.3 (along with OpenGL ES 3.2).
The company claims that its new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 can support displays with QHD+ resolution at up to 144Hz or 4K displays at up to 60Hz. External displays are supported up to 4K resolution at 60Hz (10-bit Rec. 2020 colour gamut, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision to boot). It has also finally enabled AV1 video decoding, which allows streams of up to 8K resolution up to 60Hz with HDR.
Cameras
Qualcomm claims that all Sony sensors with Digital Overlap HDR (DOL-HDR) and Samsung’s 200MP HP3 have been optimised to now work with the Snapdragon ISP. The new processor comes with a triple 18-bit ISP, which can handle up to three 36-megapixel (30 fps) cameras simultaneously, or one 200-megapixel camera. 108-megapixel sensors supported with zero shutter lag.
In the video department, the SoC can handle 8K HDR footage at 30 fps (64-megapixel photos), 4K at 120 fps, and slow-motion videos at 720p at 960 fps.
The chipset supports HDR10+, HLG and Dolby Vision formats.
DOL sensor support also allows the chipset to capture up to four exposures for each frame of video.
Connectivity
Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 comes with the new Snapdragon X70 modem, which supports both mmWave and sub-6GHz 5G, with peak downlink speeds of 10Gbps and peak uplink speeds of 3.5Gbps.
The modem comes with support for Dual SIM and Dual Active operation with both SIMs supporting 5G networks.
For local connectivity, the company has added Wi-Fi 7 standard support, with top speeds of up to 5.8Gbps, and low latency using its wire-like technology. It comes with support for Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity. Other connectivity options supported include USB 3.1 with Quick Charge 5.
The Snapdragon Sound system can deliver 48kHz lossless music streaming and has the lowest-ever 48ms latency for gaming.
AI
The new Hexagon processor brings support for the new INT4 format. With this, the company has promised 60 percent better performance per Watt. It states, that the SoC's AI performance has increased by 4.35x. This power can help the cameras recognise the parts of an image for better processing.
