The Snapdragon Summit 2022 has unveiled the highly anticipated Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform, promising to revolutionize the flagship smartphone experience.
Snapdragon’s highlight event of 2022 held in Hawaii from November 15th to 16th centered around the announcement of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The platform will be adopted by global brands including ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, and Redmi to name a few. Expect to see it in commercial devices as early as the end of 2022.
Key Experience Pillars show AI integration systemwide
With the latest iteration of the SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 offers better performance with the new Qualcomm® Hexagon™ Processor that has a 3.2GHz Arm-Cortex X3 prime core. The mobile platform offers a host of new features, described as six “Key Experience Pillars” by Qualcomm. The first and most central pillar is Snapdragon Smart, which utilizes AI integration across the system. This integration allows faster natural language processing, multi-language translation and advanced AI camera features.
Expect camera performance improvements with Snapdragon Sight, which uses AI to better recognize facial features, hairs and even the sky to allow professional grade image tuning. The platform will support new image sensors and features from other brands such as Sony’s quad digital overlap HDR technology and Samsung’s ISOCELL HP3, the first 200-megapixel image sensor. It also has an AV1 codec with support for video playback up to 8K HDR at 60 frames per second.
Elite Gaming Performance
Snapdragon Elite Gaming will be welcome news to gaming fans as the 8 Gen 2 comes with an improved Adreno GPU. The highlight is the mobile platform will have Ray Tracing to further elevate gaming visuals. This will also be the first platform to support Vulkan 1.3 API on top of improved and more efficient performance.
High Speed Connectivity with Wi-Fi 7, improved 5G and dual Bluetooth
Connectivity will be improved on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 as described in the Snapdragon Connect Experience pillar. Sporting the new Snapdragon X70 5G Modem-RF System with Qualcomm® 5G AI Processor, expect faster than ever 5G speeds and first-in-market to support 5G+5G/4G Dual-SIM Dual-Active. It also features the Qualcomm® FastConnect™ 7800 connectivity system, for low latency Wi-Fi 7 and dual Bluetooth connectivity.
Soundly secure
Snapdragon has also beefed-up security on its new platform, with Snapdragon Secure. Described as premium level protection, it offers the latest tech available to protect your data and privacy with features such as the Qualcomm® 3D Sonic Sensor a Max fingerprint sensors. Finally, expect better audio performance with Snapdragon Sound. It features spatial audio with dynamic head-tracking for better surround-sound experience and supports 48kHz lossless music. Gamers will benefit from the built-in voice backchannel for clearer in-game voice chat and lowest-ever latency at 48ms.
In short, Snapdragon has brought out all the features of a flagship-level mobile platform with more intricate AI utilization as icing on the cake. For a full list of specifications and features, visit the official Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 webpage.