Qualcomm has just released the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the latest processor that’s going to power most of the flagships of Android devices in 2023.
First, let’s list some of the phones that are going to be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
- Samsung Galaxy s23, S23 plus and s23 Ultra
- Xiaomi 13 and 13 Pro
- IQOO 11 and 11 Pro
- Oppo Find X6 series
- Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5
- OnePlus 11 and 11 Pro
- Vivo X90 Pro plus
- Moto X40
And a lot more flagships will be using this super amazing chipset. But what makes this chipset special? What makes it better than its predecessor? What qualities makes it stand out from other chipsets from other brands? These are some of the questions this article wants to address and find answers to them.
The snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was unveiled on the 15th of November at the Snapdragon Summit held in Hawaii. According to Cisco Cheng a senior director of product marketing at Qualcomm, this chipset was “purpose built for AI”.
This means any device that is using this chipset will be capable of performing so many AI enabled functions. Some of which includes multi language translation, customized wake words and many more.
Google’s Tensor chips and Mediatek Dimensity 9200 are some of the competitors to this latest chip from Qualcomm. These also boast of special AI features as well.
It also parks a lot of features that Gaming phone manufacturers can take advantage of. This is music to ears of Asus ROG, Nubia, RedMagic and others in that industry.
Qualcomm AI Engine:
This new platform is an AI marvel. AI was integrated across all facets of this platform to give mobile device users a taste of AI accelerated experiences.
Its recent hardware changes makes it perform almost 5x more than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. It is the fastest AI engine ever included in any platform launched by Qualcomm. Neural network processing is much faster thanks to the micro tile inferencing now supported by the Hexagon Processor.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Performance.
This platform is in the same category as Apple’s A16 Bionic reason being that it was built on a 4-nanometer process.
From all the tests we have done, this platform is only second to the A16 Bionic in terms of performance. It is 35% faster than its predecessor: the 8 Gen 1.
It will also make mobile experiences more efficient thereby leading to bigger gains in helping phones last longer on one charge.
Gaming on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
Qualcomm hopes to bring console quality gaming to mobile devices with its latest platform. This platform comes loaded with the Adreno GPU which handles all graphics and video processing.
It is expected to boost graphics rendering by 25% and power efficiency by 45%. The new Snapdragon platform now has support for the Unreal Engine 5 metahumans framework and Vulkan 1.3.
Image Signal Processing on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
This amazing platform has support for semantic real time segregation. This is made possible by the Spectra 18 bit triple cognitive image signal processor on board the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
All of these hardwares and features helps the AI neural engine to be able to recognize faces, facial features, clothes, etc and also helps in real time image tuning.
It also supports image capture of up to 200MP and 8k HDR video capture in 10 but HDR.
Connectivity on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
On board this platform is a modem that has a dedicated AI processor for optimizing 5G performance. It is the Snapdragon X70 which was launched earlier this year by Qualcomm.
It also has support for the latest wireless standard: Wifi 7. Not many devices have it at the moment but this will give amazing WiFi speeds of upto 5.6Gbps.
Sound and Security on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
It supports spatial audio and 48mHz lossless music.
Security is made possible by the Snapdragon Secure which supports security concepts and processes like isolation, cryptography, key management, facial recognition amongst many others
Summary
As technology advances, Qualcomm would also bring more powerful platforms that will surpass the capabilities of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform. But for now, this is the best of the best.
Will it make flagship phones more expensive? That we can not tell for now as only a few devices have been seen spotted using this new platform
