Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC officially announced

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.