Less than a year after the release of Snapdragon 8 Gen1, Qualcomm launched a new generation of mobile flagship chip-Snapdragon 8 Gen2 at the 2022 Snapdragon Technology Summit.
From the mediocre 8 Gen1 to the 8+ Gen1 with a win-win experience and reputation, Qualcomm abandoned Samsung’s 4nm and switched to TSMC’s 4nm. Today, Snapdragon 8 Gen2 continues to adopt TSMC’s 4nm process technology, and has ushered in comprehensive upgrades in 5G, AI, video, audio, games and security.
It is reported that many OEMs and brands around the world will adopt Snapdragon 8 Gen2, including Asus ROG, Honor, iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, Red Devils, Redmi, Sharp, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi, Star Age/ Meizu and ZTE, commercial terminals are expected to be available by the end of 2022.
Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi Group, revealed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen2 will be the first to be carried by Xiaomi’s new flagship.
“The second-generation Snapdragon 8 will inject new momentum into the flagship smartphone market in 2023,” said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm Technologies’ mobile business.
TSMC’s 4nm process greatly improves performance
Like the Snapdragon 8 Gen1, the Gen2 overall chip uses a 4nm process.
The changes in the core configuration are even more obvious: starting with the CPU, Gen2’s Kryo CPU includes an Arm Cortex-X3-based main core with a frequency of 3.2GHz. There are also four performance cores (one more than last year at 2.8GHz) and three efficiency cores (at 2.0GHz), all 200-300MHz faster than last year’s hardware.
Compared with Snapdragon 8 Gen1, Gen2 achieves a substantial performance improvement. Qualcomm says Gen2 CPUs are 35 percent faster than the previous generation and consume 40 percent more energy. Another optimization is that the two performance cores support both 64-bit and 32-bit operations so that legacy applications can run efficiently.
Similarly, the newly upgraded Adreno GPU improves performance by 25% and energy efficiency by 45% with support for Vulkan 1.3.
Snapdragon 8 Gen2 uses the Snapdragon X70 5G modem and RF system integrated with Qualcomm 5G AI processor, which uses powerful AI features to support breakthrough 5G upload and download speeds, network coverage, low latency and excellent energy efficiency. Snapdragon 8 Gen2 is also the first Snapdragon mobile platform to support 5G+5G/4G dual-card dual-pass, while giving full play to the power and flexibility of two 5G SIM cards.
Additionally, the Snapdragon 8 Gen2 promises peak Wi-Fi speeds of 5.8Gbps via new Wi-Fi 7 support. This ultra-advanced platform features the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 connectivity system, which brings ultra-low latency Wi-Fi 7 and dual Bluetooth connectivity for a long-lasting immersive experience. The high-frequency concurrent multi-connection technology helps to achieve the peak performance of Wi-Fi 7 on a global scale, thereby bringing smooth connections in many scenarios such as streaming media and games.
You’ll need a Wi-Fi 7 access point to enjoy the benefits, though, and there aren’t many options out there just yet. TP Link’s promise is – to launch the device in the first quarter of 2023.
Significantly upgraded AI performance
The AI engine has become another highlight. With the support of the upgraded Hexagon processor, Snapdragon 8 Gen2 realizes multilingual translation and AI imaging features brought about by faster natural language processing.
Based on the new architecture upgrade of the Hexagon processor, including micro-slicing inference and a larger tensor accelerator, the Snapdragon 8 Gen2 achieves up to 4.35 times the AI performance improvement.
Qualcomm said: “Transformer networks power NLP, and our support for Transformer networks has been upgraded to achieve better performance in more and more new ways. This is thanks to the industry’s only Micro Tile Inferencing technology, so we can support Features like real-time multilingual translation. In other words, you can speak into a language translator and have it translated into multiple languages running these complex networks.”
Snapdragon 8 Gen2 is also the first Snapdragon mobile platform to support the INT4 AI precision format, which can achieve a 60% energy efficiency improvement in continuous AI reasoning. Compared with Gen1, the overall performance has been improved by 90%.
With the new AI-powered Cognitive ISP, Snapdragon 8 Gen2 can enhance photos and videos in real time with semantic segmentation. That means every aspect of a photo or video frame is identifiable — faces, hair, clothing, backgrounds — and individually optimized. That is, every detail is fine-tuned before the shutter is ready to be pressed.
Snapdragon Sight now has a cognitive ISP capable of running AI models, so the camera can view the environment hierarchically and adjust in real time.
(Left) Original photo, (right) Shadow and color effects achieved when the photo was captured using real-time semantic segmentation.
The last thing worth paying attention to is ray tracing. Samsung (with help from AMD) and Arm’s Immortalis GPU hardware ray tracing support once beat Qualcomm, but now the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 can also bring lifelike lighting, reflections and lighting effects to mobile games. There isn’t any official mobile software for ray tracing yet.
Based on the performance improvement and energy efficiency improvement of CPU and GPU, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 allows users to perform top-level operations with longer battery life. The Snapdragon mobile platform is the first in the world to support the mobile-optimized Unreal Engine 5 Metahuman framework, allowing players to experience realistic characters in games.
Reference link:
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