Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC at its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit on Wednesday. The new mobile 5G platform brings a list of upgrades over last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC and is said to be 40% more power efficient than the old model. It offers real-time ray tracing for gaming, and supports INT4 and Wi-Fi 7. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 supports new image sensors like the 200-megapixel Samsung ISOCELL HP3 and supporting sensors Sony’s new HDR format. It has enhanced AI capabilities and cognitive ISP for a better camera experience. The new mobile platform comes with the new Snapdragon Sound featuring spatial sound with dynamic head tracking. In addition, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is claimed to be the world’s first 5G AI processor in a mobile platform.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Available
The second generation leading mobile chip of Qualcomm will be adopted by global smartphone brands including AsusROG, Respect, iQoo, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, oppo, red magic, Red, Sharp, Sony Corporation, vivi, XiaomiXingi/Meizu, and ZTE. Phones powered by the new chip expected by the end of 2022, the company note.
Features of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is powered by Qualcomm AI Engine and it comes with an improved Hexagon processor for AI and machine learning capabilities. This new chip is based on 4nm process technology, the same process used by Apple’s A16 Bionic chip. Qualcomm says the AI department on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 delivers improved results in natural language processing with multilingual translation and advanced AI camera features. With the support of a larger tensor accelerator, the new Hexagon processor is said to deliver up to 4.35x AI performance boost.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is claimed to be the first Qualcomm mobile chip to support the Nvidia INT4 AI precision format, with 60% improved performance for sustained AI inference. The latest Qualcomm Sensing Hub features dual AI processors and is said to offer support for custom wake words.
On top of that, the new mobile platform comes with the Snapdragon Sight update for photographers. It brings the company’s first cognitive ISP feature to perform real-time semantic segmentation. Using an AI neural network, the camera identifies differences in faces, hair, clothes and even the sky for professional image adjustments.
Qualcomm has also added support for upcoming image sensors on the new chip. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will support 200 megapixels Samsung ISOCELL HP3 sensor and sensor based on Sony’s new HDR technology. Furthermore, Qualcomm has also enabled the AV1 video codec with the ability to support video playback up to 8K HDR at 60 frames per second.
For gaming, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 offers Snapdragon Elite Gaming features including real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing with HDR scenes. The latest Adreno GPU is promised to deliver up to 25% faster performance with up to 45% higher power efficiency. The mobile platform supports the Unreal Engine 5 Metahumans Framework allowing gamers to experience real human characters in their games.
On the connectivity front, users will get Wi-Fi 7 with the Snapdragon FastConnect 7800 system on the new chip. This is an upgrade over the FastConnect 6900 that was used by SoC Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 last year. There is also Bluetooth v5.3 support. The latest mobile platform features the new Snapdragon X70 5G modem and it is the first Snapdragon platform to support 5G+5G/4G Dual-SIM Dual-Active support allowing two 5G SIMs to be used at the same time.
Featuring the latest Snapdragon audio system, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is claimed to deliver 48kHz lossless music streaming as well as the lowest 48ms latency ever for gaming. It also includes a spatial sound feature with dynamic head tracking for full surround sound immersion.
Furthermore, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is secured with the Snapdragon Secure feature to protect data stored on devices powered by the new SoC.
As revealed by many List of GeekbenchThe Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will feature Arm Cortex-X3 cores clocked at 3.2GHz, four Cortex-A715 cores clocked at up to 2.8GHz, and three Cortex-A510 cores clocked at up to 2GHz.
