Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 launched at the Snapdragon Summit is Qualcomm’s flagship platform for smartphones in 2022. The new Snapdragon chip comes as a successor to the Snapdragon 888 series, which has powered multiple premium smartphones, including the likes of the OnePlus 9 Pro, Vivo X60 Pro Plus, Mi 11 Ultra, Realme GT 5G, etc.
Qualcomm has changed the naming scheme of its flagship mobile platform to make it easier for consumers to distinguish between its offerings. The new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is based on a 4nm process. Qualcomm states that Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 leads the way into a new era of premium mobile technology equipped with cutting-edge 5G, AI, gaming, camera, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies to transform the next-generation of flagship devices. It has a 1+3+4 cluster setup with one X2 prime core clocked at 3.0GHz and three performance cores clocked at 2.85GHz. There are four efficiency cores clocked at 1.79GHz.
The first set of brands confirmed to launch smartphones with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC are iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, Honor Realme, Redmi, Vivo and Xiaomi. The devices are expected to debut as early as December 2021.
The new Snapdragon processor comes with a 4th-generation Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System, which is the world’s first to reach 10 Gigabit download speeds. Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 also comes with Qualcomm’s FastConnect 6900 Mobile Connectivity System supporting the fastest Wi-Fi speeds available—up to 3.6 Gbps—over Wi-Fi 6 and 6E to ensure games and apps perform smoothly.
In terms of camera, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 comes with the company’s Snapdragon Sight technology, which is the first 18-bit ISP for mobile. It is claimed to capture up to 4000x more data for extreme dynamic range, colour and sharpness at 3.2 gigapixels per second. It is also the first 8K HDR video capture in a mobile platform, capable of capturing in HDR10+ format.
The chip also features over 50 Snapdragon Elite Gaming features claiming to deliver rich HDR scenes and ultra-smooth responsiveness. The Adreno GPU under the hood is said to offer up to a 30 percent boost in graphics performance while having a 25 percent improvement in terms of efficiency. Another mobile-first feature is Variable Rate Shading Pro to provide a finer grain of control for game developers to further tune game performance. Other features include support for Bluetooth 5.2 and a Trust Management Engine for data protection.
