Qualcomm at its Snapdragon Summit 2022 announced its latest flagship chipset called Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The company claims that the new chipset will define a new standard for connected computing and is more powerful than Gen 1 chips. The new chipset is also said to bring more AI capabilities to the platform.
“Providing new developer communities with access to our technologies will further enable innovation that accelerates the digital economy and drives the greater good,” said Ziad Asghar, vice president of product management, at Qualcomm Technologies. “Improving time-to-market for developers by minimizing the time from intent to prototype will allow these communities to leverage our One Technology Roadmap for their product needs.”
The latest gen 2 chipset succeeds the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset that was launched in May this year. The new chipset is said to be an upgrade over the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 in terms of performance. The company claims that the new chipset will offer “faster natural language processing with multi-language translation and advanced AI camera features.” The first commercial devices with the latest chipset are expected by the end of 2022.
The chip is formally called SM8550-AB and is built on the same TSMC’s 4nm process node as Apple’s A16 Bionic chipset. The new chipset uses an octa-core set-up packing in one Cortex-X3 core clocked at 3.19GHz, two Cortex-A715 cores running at 2.8GHz, two Cortex-A710 cores with a 2.8GHz frequency, and three Cortex-A510 cores running at 2GHz.
Qualcomm claims that the architectural change in the new chips will help deliver up to 4.35X faster AI performance than its predecessor. Additionally, the support for INT4 precision will help boost the performance by up to 60% over its predecessor for sustained AI inferencing.
Qualcomm also highlights that the internal changes in the chipset will improve the camera’s abilities as well. The latest chips come with new Cognitive ISP powers to offer real-time semantic segmentation for photo and video capture and deliver customized professional quality improvements.
Snapdragon 8Gen 2 comes with a first-gen Adreno GPU that claims to deliver 25% higher performance and 45% improved power efficiency. It comes with support for real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing which should deliver authentic light, reflections, and illuminations for desktop-level gaming experiences. Qualcomm states that it will offer the first mobile-optimized support for the Unreal Engine 5 Metahumans Framework that will let players “experience photorealistic human characters in their games.”
The company claims that Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the world’s first and only mobile platform to come with a dedicated 5G AI processor. The chipset comes with a new Snapdragon X70 modem that supports Dual-SIM, Dual-Active (DSDA) operation for 5G SIMs. The connectivity features include the upcoming WiFi 7 which will offer ultra-low latency, ultra-fast data and high reliability.
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