Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Processor Ups the AI Smarts - PCMag

Qualcomm connected Tuesday announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, its flagship mobile system-on-a-chip that volition powerfulness the world's apical Android phones and tablets for the adjacent year. The institution focused connected adding features crossed the silicon that it says volition bring "groundbreaking AI" to aggregate aspects of the mobile experience.

The tentpole features see Snapdragon Smart, which boosts the chip's AI performance, Snapdragon Sight for amended entity recognition, Snapdragon Elite Gaming, which adds enactment for hardware accelerated ray tracing, Snapdragon Connect for AI-driven connectivity, and Snapdragon Sound for spatial audio and lossless support.

The archetypal commercialized devices are expected to scope the marketplace earlier the extremity of the year.

Get Smart(er)

Qualcomm is banking connected its re-architected CPU combined with updates to the GPU, Hexagon processor, and Sensung Hub to make caller artificial quality smarts successful the 8 Gen 2. It's relying connected a 4nm process successful the Kryo CPU, which is made up of a azygous premier halfway driven by an Arm Cortex-X3 astatine up to 3.2GHz, 4 show cores astatine up to 2.8GHz, and 3 ratio cores astatine up to 2.0GHz. The 8 Gen 1, by mode of comparison, had 1 premier core, 3 show cores, and 4 ratio cores. Qualcomm says this caller statement delivers 40% much show without impacting artillery life.

(Credit: Qualcomm)

The institution overhauled the Hexagon processor with a fused AI accelerator architecture with an updated Tensor accelerator, Vector extensions, Scalar accelerator, and Direct Link. Combined with the caller Sensing Hub, which contains dual AI audio processors and always-sensing camera support, and the 8 Gen 2 brings up to 4.35x the AI show of the erstwhile procreation spot portion expanding ratio by 60%. This volition besides let telephone makers to bring much on-device earthy connection processing to their hardware successful a mode akin to Google's Tensor-powered Pixel smartphones.

Snapdragon Sight takes existent purpose astatine boosting the powerfulness of smartphone cameras. The Spectra representation awesome processor supports representation sensors up to 200MP successful assorted configurations arsenic good arsenic 8K video seizure with 64MP stills, 8K60 playback, 10-bit color, and AI-based autofocus, facial recognition, and exposure. Qualcomm says these caller features let for unafraid facial designation for telephone locks, with aboriginal devices capable to relationship for facial features, hair, eyes, skin, and more. Moreover, Qualcomm is moving much intimately with representation sensor makers Samsung and Sony to amended integrate these features into aboriginal phone-base cameras.

Entertainment Abounds

Qualcomm says the 8 Gen 2 volition bring caller and richer amusement experiences to mobile devices. For example, the revised GPU is 25% faster and supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing. This volition beryllium a boon connected the mobile gaming front, offering much lifelike lighting and shadiness effects successful games. The GPU besides supports HDR 10, HDR 10+, Dolby Vision, 10-bit color, hardware accelerated H.265 and V9 decoding, arsenic good arsenic OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0, and Vulkan 1.3. These volition let crippled developers to truly propulsion boundaries and make much immersive worlds.

(Credit: Qualcomm)

Display enactment ranges up to 4K screens astatine 60Hz oregon QHD+ displays astatine up to 144Hz. Most of today's apical phones person QHD+ screens with up to 120Hz refresh rates, but the 8 Gen 2 volition fto telephone makers bump those specs up a notch. The spot besides supports subpixel rendering for OLED uniformity and OLED anti-aging compensation to trim burn-in.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 pushes audio boundaries acknowledgment to a caller mentation of Snapdragon Sound. The revised audio enables 48KHz lossless audio for euphony streaming, helping span the past mile betwixt mobile phones and wireless headphones. It besides features spatial audio with dynamic head-tracking for a implicit situation dependable experience. Qualcomm didn't hide astir gamers, who volition beryllium capable to instrumentality vantage of caller low-latency gaming modes that trim audio hold to 48ms.

High-Speed Connections

Qualcomm claims that its caller Snapdragon Connect level is the "world's astir precocious 5G platform." It takes each imaginable transportation and adds a dose of AI for on-device show improvements crossed the board.

(Credit: Qualcomm)

Snapdragon Connect is paired with the Snapdragon X70 5G modem and RF system, which banks connected artificial quality to equilibrium 5G upload and download speeds with coverage, latency, and powerfulness efficiency. Importantly, it's the archetypal to enactment dual 5G SIMs, meaning radical tin tally 2 5G connections to a instrumentality astatine a clip for idiosyncratic and enactment numbers. Top download speeds tin scope 10Gbps implicit 5G, portion upload speeds apical retired astatine 3.5Gbps. It supports 5G mmWave and sub-6GHz successful standalone and non-standalone modes

Despite the information that the Wi-Fi Alliance hasn't finalized the Wi-Fi 7 spec, Qualcomm is moving guardant with Wi-Fi 7 via the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 connectivity system. The institution says the 7800 offers debased latency Wi-Fi 7 show with downloads reaching 5.8Gbps. Other Wi-Fi features of the 7800 see 8x8 MIMO, 4K QAM, dual-band simultaneous (2x2, 2x2), arsenic good arsenic WPA3 enterprise-grade security.

Bluetooth enactment ranges up to mentation 5.3 with aptX, aptX Adaptive, aptX Lossless, and LE audio codecs.

The spot includes astir each planetary determination systems, specified arsenic GPS, Glonass, Galileo, QZSS, and NavIC. It has dual-band L1/L5 GPS for amended municipality pedestrian tracking, which volition pb to amended street-level representation experiences erstwhile walking amongst gangly buildings.

Other insignificant features of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 see enactment for up to 16GB of LPDDR5x representation up to 4200MHz, USB 3.1, USB-C, UFS 4.0, and a unafraid processing portion for amended endeavor information performance. Qualcomm QuickCharge 5.0 is connected committee for accelerated power-ups.

Coming Soon

Qualcomm announced that a wide fig of hardware partners person already signed up to follow the 8 Gen 2. Some telephone makers see Asus, Honor, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, and Sony. Some of the instrumentality makers volition person 8 Gen 2 products successful the marketplace by the extremity of the year.

(Credit: Qualcomm)

Notably absent from Qualcomm's archetypal database of supporters? Samsung.

You tin expect a ample fig of 8 Gen 2 devices to motorboat during the archetypal 4th of 2023, peculiarly astir the forthcoming Mobile World Congress commercialized show.