Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC officially announced

(Image Courtesy: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm has announced the company's new System-on-a-chip (SoC) will be coming to Android phones over the next few months. The new chip was revealed during Snapdragon Summit 2022 and compared to Gen 1, it has 35 percent better CPU performance, 25 percent faster GPU performance and is a massive improvement in terms of artificial intelligence (AI) computation.

The company said that the new chip will make its way into phones as early as the end of the year and the first Android phones featuring the new chip will come from ASUS, Honor, iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, Red Magic, Redmi, Sharp, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi, Meizu and ZTE.

At the heart of the CPU is a Cortex-X3 core clocked at 3.2GHz, this is complemented by four performance cores and three efficiency cores. The performance core cluster is clocked at 2.8GHz and the efficiency core cluster is capable of 2.0GHz.

What's interesting is that Qualcomm is using a mix of cores in the performance cluster (2 x Cortex-A715 and 2 x Cortex-A710) and the reason for the older A710 cores is likely to maintain native 32-bit support for apps. The performance cluster is paired with an efficiency cluster made up of three Cortex-A510 cores.

The new chip also boasts some gaming enhancements with a new Adreno GPU that is capable of hardware raytracing that is used for real-time reflections, advanced lighting techniques and global illumination in games.

Qualcomm is also promising a 40 percent increase in battery life over Gen 1 chips and there is support for Wi-Fi 7 and dual Bluetooth connectivity. As expected the chip also features a 5G modem with dual-active dual-SIM support.

A new Qualcomm AI engine delivers up to 4.5x better performance compared to Gen 1, thanks to a new Hexagon AI processor.

The chip supports multi-language translation, natural language processing and AI Camera functionality. It's also the first chip by the company to support INT4, which is an AI format. It also has Qualcomm's AI sensing hub that offers support for custom AI assistant trigger words.