San Diego-based Qualcomm has finally launched the next-generation flagship chipset for Android smartphones with a tonne of improvements on-board. The chipset used the ARMv9 instruction set to improve its performance. Perhaps, its naming system is the one you should be looking for as it will be called Snapdragon 8 Gen1 instead of Snapdragon 898. Here, Qualcomm has simplified the nomenclature as the initial digit after Snapdragon signifies class i.e. “8” is for flagship generations. Read more about the chipset here.
All you need to know about Snapdragon 8 Gen1
The Snapdragon 8 Gen1 uses a 4nm manufacturing node with eight cores spread across a three cluster design i.e. 1+3+4 cores. The Cortex-X2 clocked at 3.0GHz is the high-octane prime core that we have already seen with a flagship chipset from Qualcomm’s competitors. Apart from that, there are three Cortex-A710 cores clocked at a max frequency of 2.5GHz and finally, there are four power-efficient Cortex-A510 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. This contraption helps Gen1 to achieve 30% less power consumption as well as 20% faster performance.
The chipset brings a lot of hardware with it and the features that it will offer. The GPU on-board is a new Adreno GPU capable of producing 30% higher performance while consuming 25% less power. The graphics processing unit comes with three Elite Gaming features including Volumetric lighting that will produce dramatic lighting effects, a Variable Rate Sharing Pro that will allow developers to integrate VRS into their games, and more. Vulkan’s performance on the chipset is stipulated to have risen by 60%.
Apart from that, the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 offers the highest HDR, desktop-level capabilities, ultra-smooth gaming, and more. There’s a Snapdragon X65 5G modem integrated with the SoC that can achieve a theoretical peak of 10Gbps and covers both Sub-6 and mmWave 5G operations. There’s also carrier aggregation for uploads which is first of a kind on chipsets.
Snapdragon 8 Gen1 is equipped with the latest WiFi standards i.e. 6 and 6E along with improved Bluetooth, with LE. There’s a new layer for security called the Trust Management Engine (TME) that remains uncompromised even if all security zones have become compromised.
The chipsets support up to 8K HDR video capture, 18-bit ISP camera data, there’s a 3rd Gen Qualcomm Sensing Hub and a 7th Gen Qualcomm AI Engine on-board. Snapdragon 8 Gen1 will launch before the end of this year followed by the first devices probably in the first quarter of 2022.
