Official Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2: first smartphones arriving by the end of the year

During the Snapdragon Summit 2022, which is being held these days in Hawaii, Qualcomm announced its new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform which will be integrated into most of the top of the range of the main smartphone and tablet manufacturers. The first products are already expected by the end of the year, among these there could be a new top of the range from Honor. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, reads a note, “will revolutionize the high-end smartphone landscape in 2023” thanks to its high power, even faster and more advanced Qualcomm AI engine, and artificial intelligence built into the whole system.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform is made with a 4nm production process and supports up to 16GB of LP-DDR5x 4200MHz RAM, USF 4.0 memory and USB 3.1. The Kryo CPU has been renewed and now changes its structure with a Core Prime (Cortex X3) equipped with a maximum operating frequency of 3.2 GHz, which is flanked by 4 Performance Cores with frequencies up to 2.8 GHz and 3 Efficiency cores of 2.0 GHz , all supported by an 8 MB L3 Cache (compared to 6 last year). Therefore, the frequencies of all cores increase, as well as the amount of L3 Cache; changes which, according to what was declared by the company, lead to a performance improvement quantifiable around 40% compared to last year’s platform.

The platform then integrates a Snapdragon X70 modem with 5G mmWave and sub-6 GHz support, standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA), standalone mmWave and mmWave-sub6 dual connectivity, FDD and TDD.

The system FastConnect 7800 offers Wi-Fi 7 connectivity with maximum speed of 5.8 Gbps. Also supported is 8K HDR @30FPS, 4K @120 fps video recording, 720p @960 fps slow motion and video playback up to 8K @60 fps. Supported displays with maximum resolution 4K @60Hz and QHD+ @144Hz.

As already last year, but even more so in this 2022 Summit, Qualcomm places the emphasis on artificial intelligence, now a fundamental element of these platforms. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is powered by a revamped Qualcomm Hexagon processor which enables both faster natural language processing, with multilingual translation, and advanced AI capabilities for the camera. Qualcomm has updated this processor architecture with technologies that enable 4.35 times the performance of the current Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 platform.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is also the first mobile platform to support INT4 precision instructions (Integer 4), a format that, thanks to a 60% improvement in performance/watt compared to INT8, allows for greater AI inference, i.e. the speed with which real-world data is fed into the trained model to generate predictions .

The Qualcomm Sensing Hub, which allows you to manage all the sensors, now integrates two AI processors, and therefore obviously higher computing power, as well as supporting the use of customized activation words. Additional features are also offered by Qualcomm AI Stack, an artificial intelligence solution capable of unifying different frameworks and runtimes.

As far as imaging is concerned, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is capable of automatically enhance photos and videos in real time thanks to semantic segmentation that uses an AI neural network to allow the camera to contextually recognize faces, facial features, hair, clothes and more and to optimize them individually so that every detail receives personalized processing.

Qualcomm called the new ISP as the world’s first cognitive image enhancement system. This obviously thanks to an increased computing power but also to a new communication technology with the Hexagon processor that allows you to process more data and faster.

Furthermore, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is already optimized to support new image sensors from Sony and theISOCELL HP3 200-megapixel camera announced by Samsung last June. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is also the first Snapdragon to include an AV1 codec with support for video playback up to 8K HDR at 60 frames per second.

Notable improvements also for gaming thanks to the new Snapdragon Elite features, including real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing that delivers even more realistic lights, reflections, and illumination. The Adreno GPU allows for up to 25% more performance than the previous generation while the Kryo CPU allows up to greater energy efficiency, in the order of over 40%. All this translates into a better gaming experience and a higher autonomy.

But not only that, the new Adreno GPU inserted inside this Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is also the first mobile GPU to support real-time Ray Tracing, all with a consumption of less than 5W. Obviously, in order to see the fruits of this update, developers need to work to release titles that support this technology. The platform also offers optimized support for Unreal Engine 5 framework with MetaHumans Creator which allows you to obtain even more photorealistic graphics.

Speaking of multimedia, however, the new Adreno component is also the first mobile GPU to support all available HDR formats: HDR10, HDR 10+, HLG and Dolby Vision.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 offers the most advanced possibility of 5G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. The Snapdragon X70 5G Modem-RF System with Qualcomm 5G AI processor exploits the full potential of artificial intelligence to enable faster 5G upload and download speeds, lower latency and high energy efficiency. This is also the first Snapdragon platform to support 5G+5G/4GDual-SIM Dual-Active, allowing you to use two 5G SIMs at the same time

The FastConnect 7800 connectivity systemIt also offers the lowest latency Wifi 7 and dual Bluetooth connectivity while High Band Simultaneous Multi-Link enables faster and more stable connections when streaming and gaming online.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 supports the Snapdragon Sound technology which allows for greater immersion, thanks to thespatial audio with dynamic head tracking and it 48kHz lossless music streaming.

The platform also offers an even higher level of protection with increased security in isolation, encryption, key management, and attestation. All this is managed by a dedicated processor that evolves from generation to generation with the addition of a series of new technologies that make our smartphones increasingly secure.

Among the technologies shown in terms of safety we also have a new 3D unlocking system that allows for a level of reliability never seen before. This technology developed in collaboration with Trinamix and will arrive on the first smartphones starting next year.