Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor is set to bring up to 25 percent faster graphics, 35% faster CPU performance, and up to a 40 improvement in energy efficiency for next-gen flagship phones. But it takes more than that for a mobile processor to stand out these days.
So Qualcomm is also promising big boosts in AI, camera, and connectivity. The company says the first phones with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor will begin shipping by the end of 2022.
Qualcomm says the new chip offers up to a 4.35X boost to AI performance as well as 60 percent better performance-per-watt for sustained AI tasks. Among other things, that should help with:
- Faster natural language processing
- Multi-language translation
- AI camera features (detect faces, hair, clothes, and other features and optimize photos accordingly)
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor is also Qualcomm’s first Snapdragon chip to support the AV1 video codec for 8K HDR video playback at up to 60 frames per second. And it’s the first Snapdragon processor to feature support for real-time hardware-accelerated ray-tracing for accurate lighting effects in mobile games.
The chip has a Snapdragon X70 5G modem and support for dual-SIM, dual-active capabilities for use with either two 5G networks at the same time or one 5G network plus a 4G network. There’s also support for the emerging WiFi 7 wireless standard as well as Bluetooth 5.3.
Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor is manufactured using TSCM’s 4nm process, and features:
- 1 x ARM Cortex-X3 CPU @ 3.2 GHz
- 2 x ARM Cortex-A715 performance cores @ 2.8 GHz
- 2 x ARM Cortex-A710 performance cores @ 2.8 GHz
- 3 x ARM efficiency cores that top out at 2 GHz
Other features include support for camera sensors as high as 200MP and support for recording 8K HDR video with 10-bit HDR support. The chip can be used in phones with up to a 4K/60 Hz display or up to a QHD+ display with a 144 Hz refresh rate.
Wonder how the future Microsoft-Qualcomm
cobranded chips will perform relative to
Apple silicon. Windows on ARM has been
a disaster so far (Micosoft should be ashamed
to be selling this stuff, making buyers beta
testers, like in the early days of x86 Windows).
Well, you’re not really wrong, but your timeline is a bit off.
In the early days of x86 Windows the internet was considered optional. Users couldn’t be beta testers. In fact it was a noteworthy event that for Windows 10 Microsoft actually got rid of much of the testing team because they could use telemetry now that the internet was no longer an option.
It depends on what Power Envelope and what Tasks you’re trying to compute.
Apple has a huge advantage because it develops their custom hardware and custom software together. They have some of the best talent in the world working on this.
Windows isn’t that efficient, but they’re improving the optimisation on ARM architecture slowly. Android is even less efficient but they’ve had 15 years of optimisations.
So Android is much faster AND more efficient on the low-power side, while Windows is better on the high-power side. Apple is better all across the power range (iPhone mini, to iPad mini, to Macbook Air, to MacBook 16, and the Mac Studio).
I don’t see Qualcomm being competitive until they start releasing chips with those new Oryon cores they announced.