Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, the company’s flagship chip, which will be coming to many Android phones in the next few months. Beyond the usual newer, better, and hopefully faster cores, the big news is the addition of Wi-Fi 7 support so you can improve your home wireless experience – assuming you invest in a new router.
Qualcomm has some complaints about this new chip. The company claims that the CPU “improves performance by up to 35 percent”and “improves energy efficiency by up to 40 percent.”The GPU is said to “deliver up to 25% faster performance and up to 45% better power efficiency”. Take both of these claims with a pinch of salt, as last year Qualcomm promised a 20 percent CPU improvement that never showed up in shipping products. Even if Qualcomm delivers on those performance promises, it will still be about a year behind the iPhone. The company is trying to do something about its uncompetitive performance with the (now legally encumbered) acquisition of Nuvia, but those chips aren’t ready yet.
Let’s start with the basics. It is a 4nm chip with an unusual layout containing four different processor cores designed by Arm. The main core is an Arm Cortex X3 clocked at 3.2GHz – all good and to be expected, and hence the recommended Arm layout is three Cortex A710 processors for “medium”workloads and four A510 processors for low power background processing. However, Qualcomm does not follow the recommended layout and after Cortex X3 it has two different cores doing “medium”tasks: a pair of Cortex-A715 processors and a pair of latest generation Cortex-A710 processors. After that, only three Cortex A510 processors are running in the background, and not four, as expected.
The reason Qualcomm added a couple of A710 processors is likely to support 32-bit systems. Arm’s recommended kernel structure for this new generation is a set of 64-bit chips only, which means that any 32-bit applications will not be able to run. This isn’t a problem for most of the world – the Pixel 7 is already shipping as the world’s first Android smartphone that can’t run 32-bit apps (the entire OS isn’t quite 64-bit yet). The Google Play Store has required 64-bit binaries since 2019, and you’ll never notice the lack of 32-bit support today. For China, however, there is no Google Play Store, and being free means 32-bit support won’t be dropped as quickly. It’s also unclear if Google is ready for full 64-bit support as the Pixel 7 is reportedlyis still being supplied. with some 32 bit libraries. Mixing and matching with older kernels allows Qualcomm to support 32-bit for another year.
Qualcomm is promising peak Wi-Fi speeds of 5.8 Gbps with new Wi-Fi 7 support, but the big benefit is even more spectrum to share with your neighbors. If you’re in a crowded apartment building with multiple hotspots, it’s easy to congest the airways and make everyone’s Wi-Fi go bad. Like Wi-Fi 6e, Wi-Fi 7 adds an extra block of spectrum that your devices can choose from, which will help in crowded places. The problem is, you’ll need a Wi-Fi 7 hotspot to see these benefits, and there aren’t many options right now. TP Link recently promised devices in the first quarter of 2023.
Qualcomm has already been beaten with Samsung’s ray tracing hardware (with the help of AMD) and Arm Immortalis GPU, but now the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 can also create fancy lighting effects. I don’t think there is any serious mobile ray tracing software out there.
It is the first Snapdragon chip to support AV1, a royalty-free video codec supported by a huge list of strong players such as Amazon, Apple, Arm, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia and Samsung. Netflix and YouTube have gone all-in on AV1 by making codec support mandatory for hardware manufacturers seeking to license these services.
We’ll think of it as the SoC for most 2023 flagship smartphones, but Qualcomm says some partners will indeed release devices before the end of the year.