Qualcomm's latest flagship processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, is official and unsurprisingly brings a host of improvements across the board. Featuring a new Kryo core layout that achieves a 35% boost in performance and up to 40% increased power efficiency over its predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 promises to ramp up the smartphone experience for 2023.
Rather than simply increasing clock speeds to produce more performance Qualcomm has given the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 new cores and a new core layout which means that there is four high-performance running at 2.8GHz which are backed up by a trio of efficiency cores running at 2.0GHz, with the main grunt coming from a Kryo Prime core (based on the Cortex-X3 core) which is clocked at 3.2GHz.
New technologies such as LPDDR5X RAM (up to 4,200MHz), and the new UFS 4.0 storage format are supported, and there's also a new Adreno GPU present which achieves a 25% performance boost and up to 45% increased power efficiency. Vulkan 1.3 APIs and ray tracing are supported by the next-gen Adreno GPU which can handle QHD+ displays with up to 144Hz refresh rates and 4K panels up to 60Hz. The AV1 video codec is also enabled which brings support for 8K streaming with HDR and 60fps.
The second-generation Snapdragon ISP can now handle three 36MP cameras @30fps simultaneously or a single 200MP camera sensor. Qualcomm says that it has worked with Sony and Samsung to optimize their sensors for use with the new Snapdragon ISP, which also brings zero-shutter lag to 108MP sensors.
The new Snapdragon X70 modem supports both mmWave and sub-6GHz 5G networking, a feature that has only just made its debut on MediaTek's new Dimensity 9200 chipset which was announced last week. The X70 modem supports Dual-SIM, Dual-Active (DSDA) which lets you use a pair of 5G SIMS simultaneously. There is also support for WiFi 7 despite the lack of an official standard, which means we can expect lower latency and speeds of up to 5.8Gbps.
We should see the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered smartphones launching before the end of 2022, although it's unlikely that Samsung's Galaxy S23 series will make its debut this year.
