During their annual Snapdragon Tech Summit 2021, Qualcomm has officially announced their latest premium mobile processor with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
“As the world’s most advanced mobile platform, Snapdragon is synonymous with premium Android experiences and the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 sets the standard for the next generation of flagship mobile devices,” said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager of mobile, compute, and infrastructure, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “It delivers connectivity, photography, AI, gaming, sound, and security experiences never before available in a smartphone.”
The first big change with the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the name. Gone is the triple digit naming scheme and in with a simplified single digit one.
Like other Snapdragon chips, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the successor to the Snapdragon 888 chip that was featured in most flagship Android phones like the Galaxy S21 series, the OnePlus 9 series and more.
The new chip features the 4th Gen Snapdragon X65 5G Modem which supports up to 10 Gigabit download speeds. There’s also FastConnect 6900 Mobile Connectivity System that helps bring faster Wi-Fi speeds via Wi-Fi 6 and 6E support.
On the camera side of things, the new chip takes advantage of Snapdragon Sign Technology that can capture over 4000x more camera data. Also supports is 8K HDR video capture in HDR10+.
Videos should look even better thanks to the new Bokeh Engine that adds beautiful soft backgrounds to video (aka a Portrait Mode for video capture).
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 also has a separate ISP called the Always-On ISP that allows the camera to run with extremely low power consumption, this should be great for always-on face unlock.
On the AI side, the chip features the 7th Gen Qualcomm AI Engine that has a 2x faster tensor accelerator and 2x larger shared memory.
For gaming, the Snapdragon 8 can bring HDR visuals to gaming thanks to the 30% performance boost in the new Adreno GPU and 25% improved power savings.
Some of the OEMs that will be making Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 equipped devices include:
- Black Shark
- Honor
- iQOO
- Motorola
- Nubia
- Realme
- Redmi
- OnePlus
- Oppo
- Sharp
- Sony
- Vivo
- Xiaomi
- ZTE
The first Android smartphones with Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 are set to be announced by the end of 2021. With more to follow in the first half of 2022 (such as the Samsung Galaxy S22 series).
Source: Qualcomm
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