Prabhu Ram, Vice President – Industry Research Group (IIG)
At the Snapdragon Summit 2022, Qualcomm introduced its latest mobile platform, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 that will power the flagship phones in the coming year. Building on last year’s Plus model, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform built on TSMC fabrication process, leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) across the board, to enable intelligent consumer experiences.
Here are the key highlights underlining Snapdragon 8 Gen 2:
Snapdragon Sight: Consumers are increasingly seeking powerful smartphone camera experiences to capture life’s key moments. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform packs the first Cognitive ISP. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 automatically enhances photos and videos in real time with semantic segmentation, which uses an AI neural network to make the camera contextually aware of faces, facial features, hair, clothes, skies and more – and optimize them individually so every detail receives customized professional image tuning.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is tuned to support new image sensors. Sony Semiconductor Solutions is the first to develop quad digital overlap HDR technology fine-tuned for Snapdragon. The Samsung ISOCELL HP3, the first 200-megapixel image sensor optimized for Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, will deliver professional quality photos and videos.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is also the first Snapdragon chipset to include an AV1 codec that supports upto 8K HDR playback at upto 60 frames per second.
Snapdragon Smart: The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 leverages the Qualcomm AI Engine to provide an all-pervasive, groundbreaking AI integrated across the board.
Consumers will experience and benefit from multi-language translation, made possible by swifter natural language processing and advanced AI camera features. This is made possible by the Qualcomm Hexagon Processor. The Hexagon processor comes with new upgrades to the architecture, including micro-tile inferencing and a bigger tensor accelerator for up to 4.35X increased AI performance.
In addition, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 supports INT4—a revolutionary AI precision format—with 60% performance/watt improvement for sustained AI inferencing.
Lastly, the Qualcomm Sensing Hub, which now packs dual AI processors, supports intuitive experiences that enable custom wake words.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 comes with real time hardware-accelerated ray tracing that delivers life-like light, reflections, and illuminations to mobile games.
The upgraded Qualcomm Adreno GPU delivers up to 25% faster performance and the Qualcomm Kryo CPU enables up to 40% more power efficiency. For gamers, this translates to photorealistic game characters, alongwith intense gameplay and, a longer battery life. In fact, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 comes with mobile optimized support for Unreal Engine 5 Metahumans Framework on Snapdragon.
Snapdragon Connect: With the Snapdragon X70 5G Modem-RF System and the Qualcomm 5G AI Processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 leverages AI at breadth to enable breakthrough 5G upload and download speeds, coverage, latency, and power efficiency.
The platform supports 5G+5G/4G Dual-SIM Dual-Active (DSDA), which harnesses the power and flexibility of two 5G SIMs at once. The platform also offers the lowest latency Wi-Fi 7 and dual Bluetooth connectivity for sustained immersion. High Band Simultaneous Multi-Link enables peak Wi-Fi 7 performance globally that translates into smoother content consumption.
Snapdragon Sound: For consumers, high-quality audio is increasingly becoming key for the new work realities, as well as for entertainment.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 supports Snapdragon Sound technology for premium and immersive music, audio calls, and intense gaming. It features spatial audio with dynamic head-tracking for complete surround-sound immersion and support for 48kHz lossless music streaming. For gamers, the lowest-ever latency at 48ms is a key feature.
Snapdragon Secure: The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform comes with Snapdragon Secure, that brings the latest in isolation, cryptography, key management, attestation, and more— to protect users’ data and privacy.
At the Snapdragon Summit 2022, trinamiX demonsted its trinamiX Face Authentication integrated into the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 reference design. The solution runs fully invisible behind the device’s OLED display while setting highest biometric security standards for future smartphones. It combines easy and fast unlock with maximum data protection and also enables a full screen viewing experience for users. This premium level of protection limits the exposure and exploitation of data on devices powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
In Summary, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 offers
• Faster natural language processing with multi-language translation and revolutionary INT4 support, leveraging AI at scale
• Real-time semantic segmentation for photo and video capture, delivering breakthrough customized professional quality enhancements, enabled by the new Cognitive ISP.
• Real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing on flagship smartphones.
• World’s first 5G AI processor in a mobile platform, and the only commercial Wi-Fi 7 SoC with High Band Simultaneous Multi-Link
