The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 brings Wi-Fi 7, sticks with some 32-bit support - Ars Technica

Qualcomm

Today, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, the company's flagship spot that volition beryllium coming to galore Android phones implicit the adjacent fewer months. Besides the accustomed newer, better, hopefully faster cores, a large portion of quality is the summation of Wi-Fi 7 enactment truthful you tin get amended location wireless—provided you put successful a caller router.

Qualcomm has immoderate claims for this caller chip. The institution says the CPU "improves show up to 35 percent" and has "up to 40 percent much powerfulness efficiency." The GPU supposedly "delivers up to 25 percent faster performance, with up to 45 percent amended powerfulness efficiency." Take some of these claims with a atom of salt, since Qualcomm past twelvemonth promised a 20 percent CPU improvement that never manifested successful shipping products. Even if Qualcomm hits these show promises, it would inactive beryllium astir a twelvemonth down the iPhone. The institution is trying to bash thing astir its uncompetitive show with the (now legally encumbered) Nuvia acquisition, but those chips aren't acceptable yet.

Let's commencement with the basics. This is simply a 4 nm spot with an antithetic layout containing 4 antithetic CPU cores, each designed by Arm. The premier halfway is simply a 3.2 GHz Arm Cortex X3—that's each bully and expected, and from here, Arm's recommended layout is 3 Cortex A710 CPUs for "medium" work and 4 A510 CPUs for low-power inheritance processing. Qualcomm isn't pursuing the recommended layout, though, and aft the Cortex X3 it has 2 antithetic cores doing "medium" duty: a brace of Cortex-A715 CPUs and a brace of last-generation Cortex-A710 CPUs. After that, determination are lone three—not the expected four—Cortex A510 CPUs doing inheritance duty.

The crushed Qualcomm threw a brace of A710s into the premix is astir apt 32-bit support. Arm's recommended halfway layout for this caller procreation is simply a clump of 64-bit-only chips, and that means immoderate 32-bit apps won't beryllium capable to run. This isn't a occupation for astir of the world—the Pixel 7 already shipped arsenic the world's archetypal Android telephone that can't tally 32-bit apps (the full OS isn't rather 64-bit-only yet). The Google Play Store has required 64-bit binaries since 2019, and contiguous you'd ne'er announcement that deficiency of 32-bit support. For China, though, determination is nary Google Play Store, and the free-for-all implicit determination means 32-bit enactment hasn't been abandoned arsenic quickly. It's besides not wide if Google is acceptable for afloat 64-bit support, with the Pixel 7 reportedly still shipping with immoderate 32-bit libraries. Mixing and matching with older cores lets Qualcomm support 32-bit enactment rolling for different year.

Qualcomm promises a highest Wi-Fi velocity of 5.8Gbps with the caller Wi-Fi 7 support, but the large payment is adjacent much spectrum to stock with your neighbors. If you're successful a crowded flat gathering with tons of entree points, it's casual to overwhelm the airways and person everyone's Wi-Fi tally poorly. Just similar Wi-Fi 6e, Wi-Fi 7 adds an further artifact of the spectrum that your devices tin take from, which volition assistance successful crowded spaces. The occupation is that you'll request a Wi-Fi 7 entree constituent to spot these benefits, and determination aren't galore options close now. TP Link recently promised devices successful Q1 2023.

Qualcomm was already beaten to the punch with hardware ray-tracing enactment by Samsung (with AMD's help) and Arm's Immortalis GPU, but present the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 tin bash fancy lighting effects, too. I don't deliberation determination are immoderate superior mobile bundle uses for ray tracing yet.

This is the archetypal Snapdragon spot to see enactment for AV1, a royalty-free video codec backed by a immense database of heavy-hitters similar Amazon, Apple, Arm, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung. Netflix and YouTube person gone all-in connected AV1 by making enactment for the codec mandatory for hardware manufacturers seeking to licence these services.

We'll deliberation of this arsenic the SoC for astir 2023 flagship smartphones, but Qualcomm says immoderate partners volition really person devices retired earlier the extremity of the year.