Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, First Smartphone Powered By The Chip Expected By 2022 End

Chipmaker Qualcomm on Wednesday (16 November) unveiled its new flagship System on Chip (SoC) 'Snapdragon 8 Gen 2' during the Snapdragon Summit 2022.

Compared to its predecessor 'Snapdragon 8 Gen 1', the Gen 2’s Kryo CPU includes one prime core based on Arm Cortex-X3 clocked at 3.2GHz, along with four performance cores (one more than last year) clocked at 2.8GHz and three efficiency cores clocked at 2.0GHz - all between 200 and 300MHz faster than last year’s hardware.

The company said that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will be adopted by global OEMs and brands including ASUS Republic of Gamers, HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMAGIC, Redmi, SHARP, Sony Corporation, vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU, and ZTE, with the first commercial devices expected by the end of 2022.

According to Qualcomm, the CPU is up to 35 percent faster than the previous generation, with up to 40 percent power savings. 

Similarly, the Adreno GPU used in the SoC is up to 25 percent faster with 45 percent better power efficiency than the previous generation GPU, the company said.

The new GPU in Gen 2 also brings support for hardware accelerated ray tracing to the Snapdragon platform.

The whole chip is built on a 4nm process node.

The Gen 2 brings support for new, faster memory technologies. For RAM it works with LP-DDR5X at up to 4,200MHz (up from LP-DDR5 at 3,200MHz). For storage it can use the new UFS 4.0 format (up from UFS 3.1).

Qualcomm said that Sony sensors with Digital Overlap HDR (DOL-HDR) and Samsung’s 200 mega pixel (MP) HP3 have been optimized to work with the Snapdragon ISP.

Like its predecessor, the Gen 2 brings a triple 18-bit ISP that can handle up to three 36MP cameras (30fps) simultaneously or go up to 200 MP for a single camera. 108MP sensors are supported with zero shutter lag.

For video, the chipset can record 8K HDR footage at 30 fps (and capture 64MP photos simultaneously), 4K at 120 fps and do slow-motion videos too (720p at 960 fps).

It supports several HDR formats including HDR10+, HLG and Dolby Vision. Using DOL sensors, it can capture up to four exposures for each frame of video.

Qualcomm said it has made improvements all throughout the Hexagon processor for up to 4.35x faster AI performance. Qualcomm also claims it’s able to handle more complex tasks, like translating a language into multiple languages in real time.

Further, the chip also supports the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 standard (802.11be).