During the company’s annual Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm Technologies unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, its most recent premium mobile platform.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform, designed with “groundbreaking AI” throughout, will set a new standard, claims Qualcomm.
ASUS, Honor, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, Redmagic, Redmi, Sharp, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU, and ZTE are a few of the OEMs and companies planning to use the platform. By the end of 2022, the first commercial devices are anticipated.
“Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, will revolutionize the landscape of flagship smartphones in 2023,” said Chris Patrick, SVP and general manager of mobile handsets at Qualcomm, in a statement. “Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 delivers groundbreaking AI, unparalleled connectivity, and champion-level gameplay, enabling consumers to enhance every experience on their most trusted device.”
One of the standout features is Snapdragon Smart, which is powered by a new Hexagon engine and gives customers access to enhanced AI photography functions and speedier natural language processing.
According to the business, the Snapdragon Sight platform “defines a new era of professional quality camera experiences.” According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 “automatically enhances photos and videos in real-time with semantic segmentation,” which employs an AI neural network to contextually recognise faces, facial features, hair, clothes, skies, and more – and individually optimise each one so that every detail receives specialised professional image tuning.
Real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which provides “life-like light, reflections and illuminations to mobile games,” is one of the new gaming capabilities enabled by Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 the company said. The upgraded Qualcomm Adreno GPU promises up to 25% faster performance and the Qualcomm Kryo CPU enables up to 40% more power efficiency, so users can enjoy longer battery life.
With “unparalleled” connection from 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 enables ground-breaking 5G upload and download speeds, coverage, latency, and power efficiency, according to Qualcomm.
The usage of two 5G SIM cards simultaneously is made possible by the first Snapdragon platform to allow 5G+5G/4G Dual-SIM Dual-Active. Additionally, it has the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 communication system, which offers dual Bluetooth connectivity and Wi-Fi 7 with the lowest latency. According to Qualcomm, High Band Simultaneous Multi-Link delivers the best Wi-Fi 7 performance.
It’s noteworthy that Qualcomm announced a hiring block during its most recent earnings call and continued with its annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui this week, given the amount of tech and telecom companies making layoffs.
This week, Fierce contacted Qualcomm and asked if it’s planning layoffs anytime soon, and a Qualcomm spokesperson responded with the following:
“We have already implemented a hiring freeze, and we have planned spending reductions across our mature product areas and SG&A to fund our diversification,” the spokesperson stated. “We are being very disciplined in managing operating expenses while optimizing our R&D investments to prudently focus on growth within automotive and IoT.”