Chipmaker Qualcomm on Wednesday unveiled its next-generation flagship chipset, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The company calls its latest chipset an ‘AI marvel‘ with cutting-edge technologies and industry-first features. The first commercial devices with the newest chipset are expected by the end of 2022. The gen 2 chipset succeeds the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset launched in May this year.
Qualcomm confirmed several companies including Honor, ZTE, Xiaomi, Meizu, Vivo, Sony, Redmi, OPPO, and OnePlus the will be launching Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered devices.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
The chip is built on a 4nm process node. The latest gen 2 chipset’s Qualcomm Kryo CPU features unique architectures with one prime core, four performance cores, and three efficiency cores. The company converted one of the efficiency cores in the previous Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to a higher-clocking performance core to bolster performance. The new Kryo CPU trio delivers up to 35% higher performance with up to 40% higher efficiency.
The upgraded Qualcomm Hexagon Processor offers faster natural language processing with multi-language translation and advanced AI camera features. Qualcomm claims that AI performance has increased by 4.35x. The support for INT4 precision overall boosts the performance by up to 60% over its predecessor for sustained AI inferencing. The AI-powered Cognitive ISP enhances photos and videos in real-time with semantic segmentation, delivering detailed photos and videos frame. There’s AV1 support which can record 8K HDR footage at 30 fps (and capture 64MP photos simultaneously), 4K at 120 fps, and slow-motion videos too (720p at 960 fps). In addition, it also supports several HDR formats including HDR10+, HLG, and Dolby Vision. Through DOL sensors, it can capture up to four exposures for each frame of video.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 includes real-time hardware accelerated ray tracing, which the company claims will bring games to life. With this, Games will harness life-like reflections, shadows, and illuminations in real-time while delivering exceptional battery life and power efficiency. The chip also supports the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 standard for ultra-low latency and ultra-fast data, 5G, and Bluetooth. For security, the gen 2 along with trinamiX supports liveness detection designed to block spoof attempts from 2D photos and even 3D replica face models.
