Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 official: smarter, more powerful and with Wi-Fi 7

The only thing we knew is that Qualcomm’s new premium processor would arrive by the end of the year and that it would be called Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, following the new nomenclature inaugurated last year.

During the Snapdragon Summit 2022 (a few weeks earlier than usual) Qualcomm has unveiled its new mobile platform for smartphones to the world, which we will soon find in smartphones from Xiaomi, OPPO, Motorola, ASUS, HONOR and many others (here the complete list).

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 promises great innovations especially on the AI ​​​​front (with also some interesting applications shown at the event), in the photographic field and in connectivity. But not only.

Following a trend increasingly written in processors, especially mobile, the greatest innovations are now mainly concentrated in the field of artificial intelligence. This is because with dedicated components (those born many years ago in the transition from a single CPU to a System-on-a-chip) it is possible to obtain increasingly complex operations while consuming less and less energy.

As we know in the Snapdragon world everything has a brand and in the case of artificial intelligence this brand is Snapdragon Smart. Inside the SoC the processor dedicated to AI is once again thehexagon which in this iteration guarantees faster processing of natural language, also guaranteeing multi-language translation and also new features dedicated to photography.

From a technological point of view, the new Hexagon offers a new architecture that also includes micro file inferencing and a larger tensor accelerator (twice that of the past) which together offer up to 4.35 times the performance of the previous model. When we talk about inferencing we are talking about the AI ​​process that takes care of “exploiting” the skills acquired thanks to learning to carry out its task on new data in real time. This is also the first Snapdragon to support the AI ​​INT4 precision format for the first time, particularly suitable for devices with limited power consumption possibilities, which can offer up to 60% improvement in the performance / consumption ratio during operations of inferencing supported.

It’s a hardware feature: the process is broken into micro tiles, up to 10 levels simultaneously, to drastically reduce write and read operations, which consume a lot of energy. As happens with many of these innovations, in fact, it’s not just a question of doing more (let’s face it clearly for almost all users the current power is already sufficient), but rather of doing it while consuming less energy.

The Snapdragon Smart universe is also part of the Sensing Hub, in our opinion one of the most innovative components of the latest generation SoCs. This is the part of the sensors that estimates that it can work independently from the rest of the CPU, essentially allowing it to operate even in standby and with very low consumption. In this generation, the new Sensing Hub supports a new dual AI processor that ensures personalized experiences such as the ability to activate with custom wake words.

Another area that has received a substantial update is that of photography and imaging.

The image processor is now referred to as the Cognitive ISP. This is because it Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 allows you to perform neural segmentation of images in real time even before shooting. This means that a smartphone equipped with this SoC will have the ability to recognize faces, facial features, hair, clothes, buildings, landscapes, skies and much more in real time even before shooting, thus allowing you to optimize every single shot to the fullest.

Qualcomm then worked with sony And Samsungthe largest photo sensor manufacturers to offer experiences optimized with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The first introduced a technology called quad digital overlap HDR for the first time (making two sensors in collaboration with the company), while the second created a sensor optimized for Snapdragon 8 Gen 2: the 200 megapixel ISOCELL HP3 (already announced a few months ago).

This will then be the first Snapdragon to support the AV1 codec to play movies in 8K at 60fps.

In Qualcomm’s SoCs when we talk about connectivity we talk about 5G and Wi-Fi. In the first case we have the Snapdragon X70 5G modem, which obviously supports optimizations on maximum speeds and latency, but most of all it is the first in the Snapdragon universe to support Dual-SIM Dual-Active use which allows you to use two 5G SIM cards at the same time.

The FastConnect 7800 chip, on the other hand, is what will allow the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to be the first mobile processor to support the standard Wifi 7. This standard will make it possible to create simultaneous multi-link connections to especially optimize the use of large amounts of bandwidth, for streaming, gaming or… streaming gaming. However, we recall that to date the Wi-Fi 7 standard is not yet official and therefore Qualcomm has based its technology on pre-release standards. It’s not the first time that companies have released devices with non-standard Wi-Fi versions yet.

In any case, Wi-Fi 7 (even in this implementation) will guarantee speeds of up to 5.8 Gbps, more than double Wi-Fi 6.

We also have support for Dual Bluetooth technology, which should guarantee doubling the range of Bluetooth.

Qualcomm carries on its brand Elite Gaming, which contains all the most modern technologies for mobile gaming. This Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the first mobile SoC to support software-accelerated ray tracing, to offer real-time light management as we are getting used to seeing on many desktop and console titles. Support for Unreal Engine 5 and Metahuman will enable developers to create photorealistic human characters.

The new GPU Adreno (whose version number has not been disclosed at the moment) offer 25% higher performance with 45% better efficiency, while the Kryo CPU 35% higher performance and 40% better energy efficiency. A due clarification: these percentage improvement data are calculated with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and not the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1.

The Adreno GPU is the first and only to support all HDR standards: HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision and HDR Vivid.

The implementation of ray tracing deserves a few more words. This Adreno GPU is the first GPU to take advantage of ray tracing while consuming less than 5W. During the Snapdragon Summit, OPPO joined the stage with its SDK open PhysRaya development kit for mobile ray tracing that will act as a “bridge” between smartphone manufacturers with Snapdragon processors and video game production houses.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 supports the latest version of Snapdragon Sound, which provides features such as surround sound system with head tracking support for music streaming the obsession at 48kHz. Latency, particularly valuable information for mobile gamers, has been lowered to 48ms.

Find more technical specifications on the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 at this link.