Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 for Flagship Devices

During its annual Tech Summit event in Hawaii, Qualcomm unveiled Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 next-generation flagship SoC for Android phones. It succeeds last year’s Snapdragon 888 SoC, bringing in new branding and higher performance. Moreover, this new chipset is the first to come with the new Snapdragon branding. In addition, it claims to bring four times faster artificial intelligence (AI) performance than the Snapdragon 888 SoC. Moreover, it claims to deliver 30 per cent faster graphics rendering along with 25 percent more power efficiency than the predecessor.

Snapdragon Tech Summit 2021

Brand New Naming Scheme

Qualcomm offers SoCs across different series depending on the smartphone price segments they cater to. For example, flagship chipsets are Snapdragon 888, 865, 855, etc. However, there are 3 more series namely the 7-series, 6-series, and 4-series ranging from upper mid-range all the way to budget range smartphones. But in an interesting move, the company has decided to drop its seemingly random naming scheme. It will now be under the “Snapdragon X Gen 1/2/3” wherein “X” will be the denoting the series. For example, the newest chipset launched has the branding Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

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Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Features

This new chipset comes with the 7th Gen Qualcomm AI Engine that is rated to have two times larger shared memory. Along with two times faster tensor accelerator to deliver better per-watt performance. Especially, over the 6th Gen Qualcomm AI Engine available on the Snapdragon 888 SoC. The new chip will also be based on a 4nm process technology. It is an upgrade over the 5nm process technology last year.

Qualcomm has not yet revealed the exact names of the Kryo CPU and Adreno GPU available on its Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip. However, the Kryo CPU particularly has Arm Cortex-X2 cores that can be clocked up to 3GHz. The CPU claims 20 faster performance and 30 per cent power efficiency over its counterpart available on the Snapdragon 888 SoC. The new Adreno GPU is also rated to deliver a 30 per cent boost in graphics rendering and a 25 per cent improvement in power saving in comparison with its predecessor.

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7th Gen AI Engine and Camera

Moreover, Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has a Qualcomm Hexagon processor that is available as a part of the AI Engine. The chip also has integrated Leica Leitz Look filters for an enhanced bokeh effect. Further, there is an AI-based natural language processing from the machine learning community Hugging Face. In addition, it claims to help enable a distinct personal assistance experience by analysing and prioritising your notifications.

It brings the first 18-bit image signal processor (ISP). It claims to capture over 4,000 times more camera data than its predecessor for high dynamic range, colour, and sharpness at speeds of up to 3.2 gigapixels per second. Other camera improvements unlocked by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset include much better multi-frame processing for up to 5x better Night mode performance, a dedicated Bokeh engine for 4K videos, and improvements to face detection, Auto-exposure, and video zooming capabilities.

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Other specifications and features of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 are mostly in line with its predecessor. These include support for up to 4K and QHD+ displays with up to 144Hz refresh rate, LPDDR5 RAM with a frequency of up to 3200MHz and density of up to 16GB, and Quick Charge 5 fast charging.