Qualcomm has officially announced the next-generation Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which will be powering most of the flagship smartphones launching next year. Launched as a successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, it comes with improved performance, Wi-Fi 7 support, and more.
The chipset packs a Kryo Prime core based on Cortex-X3 clocked at 3.2GHz, four Performance cores running at 2.8GHz, and three Efficiency cores clocked at 2.0GHz. The company says that the chip offers 35% higher performance compared to its predecessor and is 40% more power efficient.
In the graphics department, the new Adreno GPU is promised to deliver 25% higher performance while being 45% more power efficient. There’s also support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and it is also the first to support Vulkan 1.3, along with OpenGL ES 3.2. As for the memory, it supports LP-DDR5 at 3200MHz, and for storage, there’s support for the new UFS 4.0 format.
Qualcomm has improved the camera performance as it aims to offer a native AI-based processor similar to the Google Tensor SoC. The Snapdragon Sight platform helps the camera recognize differences in facial features, hair, clothes, and more for capturing better photos. It also comes optimized for the latest Sony and Samsung sensors, both of which pretty much dominate the smartphone camera sensor market.
It comes with support for Wi-Fi 7 technology, similar to the recently announced MediaTek Dimensity 9200 chipset. There’s a Snapdragon X70 modem that supports mmWave and sub-6GHz with a peak download speed of 10Gbps and uplink of 3.5Gbps.
Qualcomm has revealed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered smartphones will be announced by the end of this year. The company has also revealed a list of manufacturers, which includes OnePlus, Xiaomi, OPPO, ASUS ROG, Nubia, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi, and more.
