Android phones and Qualcomm are like inseparable twins; they are always together. Android devices have been using Snapdragon chipsets for more than a decade, and this will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. Today, Qualcomm announced its latest top-of-the-line chipset for Android devices.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is fabricated on a 4nm node and the new Kyrio CPU promises to deliver up to 35% higher performance with up to 40% higher efficiency.
The clock speeds are the same as 8+ Gen 1, but the cores layout is different. There’s one ARM Cortex-X3 Prime core capable of hitting up to 3.2GHz, four Performance cores running at 2.8GHz and three Efficiency cores running at 2GHz.
This new chipset also supports faster LPDDR5X RAM, up to 4,200MHz and it uses new Universal Flash Storage (UFS 4.0), delivering up to 4,200MBps read speeds and and up to 2,800MBps write speeds.
Qualcomm said the new Adreno GPU can deliver up to 25% higher performance and up to 45% higher power efficiency. Also, the GPU supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing and is the first mobile graphic processor to support Vulkan 1.3 API.
The new chipset supports on-device displays with QHD+ resolution up to 144Hz refresh rate or 4K up to 60Hz. It also supports external displays up to 4K at 60Hz with 10-bit Rec. 2020 colour gamut, HDR10+, HDR vivid and Dolby Vision. Besides that. the 8 Gen 2 finally supports AV1 video decoding that can play up to 8K 60fps HDR videos.
Like its predecessor, the 8 Gen 2 offers an 18-bit triple Cognitive ISP that can handle up to three 36MP cameras (30fps) simultaneously or go up to 200MP for a single camera. Sony sensors with Digital Overlap HDR (DOL-HDR) and Samsung’s 200MP HP3 have reportedly been optimised to work with the Snapdragon ISP, according to Qualcomm. 108MP sensors are also supported with no shutter latency.
The processor can record slow-motion films, 8K HDR videos plus 64MP images at the same time and 4K video at 120 frames per second (720p at 960fps). It is compatible with a variety of HDR formats, including HDR10+, HLG, and Dolby Vision. It can take up to four exposures using DOL sensors for every video frame.
The new chipset is using Snapdragon X70 modem, supporting mmWave and sub-6GHz 5G, with peak downlink speeds up to 10Gbps, peak uplink up to 3.5Gbps. In addition, it also support Wi-Fi 7 thanks to the FastConnect 7800 system, with speeds up to 5.8Gbps. Qualcomm added this system offers “wire-like low latency”.
Besides that, 8 Gen 2 also supports Bluetooth 5.3, 48khz lossless music streaming, and a low 48ms latency for gaming.
The flagship chipset platform is also the first Snapdragon mobile platform to be able to handle INT4 precision format, which promises up to a 60% increase in terms of performance per watt during AI workload. On the other hand, its Qualcomm Sensing Hub has a dual AI processor and 50% more RAM, which also enabled the 8 Gen 2 AI performance to improve.
Qualcomm said smartphones using the 8 Gen 2 will be arriving before the end of this year and these are the companies that will be using the new chipset: Asus ROG, Honor, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, Red Magic, Sharp, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi, Meizu and ZTE.
