Qualcomm has unveiled its latest premium processor for flagship smartphones at the annual Snapdragon Tech Summit. Billed as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 under the company's new naming structure, the chipset includes a new 5G modem with support for up to 10 Gbps as well as improvements in AI, gaming functions and camera features. The first devices running the processor are expected to hit the market before the end of 2021.
Black Shark, Honor, iQoo, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Redmi, Sharp, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE are among the phone manufacturers that have committed to using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 for their Android devices.
The platform is equipped with the fourth generation of 5G modems from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System. According to the company, this is the first 5G modem to support 10 Gbps download speeds. It also comes with the Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 Mobile Connectivity System supporting up to 3.6 Gbps over Wi-Fi 6 and 6E.
For the camera, Snapdragon Sight Technology includes the first commercial 18-bit mobile ISP, capturing over 4,000 times more camera data than its predecessor for extreme dynamic range, color, and sharpness at speeds up to 3.2 gigapixels per second. This is also the first 8K HDR video capture in a mobile platform, Qualcomm said, and it’s capable of capturing in the premium HDR10+ format that’s loaded with over a billion shades of color. In addition, there is a new Bokeh Engine for videos and a fourth separate ISP, the new Always-On ISP, which allows the camera to run at low power with always-on face unlocking.
On-device AI
Qualcomm also introduces its seventh-generation AI Engine with the high-performance Qualcomm Hexagon processor. This brings a 2x faster tensor accelerator and 2x larger shared memory than its predecessor for features such as Leica Leitz Look filters and natural language processing from Hugging Face for prioritizing and analyzing your notifications. In a feature developed with Sonde Health, on-device AI can analyze a user’s vocal patterns to determine if they are at risk for health conditions such as asthma, depression, and Covid-19.
Elite gaming and lossless sound
The Snapdragon 8 comes with over 50 Snapdragon Elite Gaming features. The new Qualcomm Adreno GPU provides a 30 percent boost in graphics rendering capabilities and 25 percent improvement in power savings compared to the previous generation, and the Adreno Frame Motion Engine to can generate twice as many frames while maintaining the same power consumption. The platform also integrates Bluetooth 5.2 and Snapdragon Sound Technology, adding Qualcomm aptX Lossless Technology as well.
In addition, this is the first Snapdragon platform to feature a dedicated Trust Management Engine to achieve heightened security and additional 'Root of Trust' for apps and services. Snapdragon 8 will also feature Android Ready SE, the new standard for authentication of digital car keys, drivers’ licenses and payments, and support for iSIM, the integrated SIM card for cars.
