What Is The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1? And The List Of Phonemakers To Use It.

December 04 19:56 2021 by Ray Kyle De Castro Print This Article

Right on time, Qualcomm held their annual Tech Summit, now in person, in Hawaii a few days ago and has finally announced their newest flagship silicon to fuel the next wave of devices for 2022, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

Addressing the elephant in the room, Qualcomm has made Snapdragon step away to its conventional three number naming scheme which ended with the 888 last year. Also, they have scrapped their naming scheme with the components inside the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, such as the GPU and DSP. Which are now addressed only as Adreno and Hexagon. This is how Apple address their components inside, but in our opinion, does not make sense since Apple only creates one chip for their phones and Qualcomm numerous. It will be interesting how Qualcomm can pull off their naming scheme with their other line.

With the naming scheme out of the way let’s talk key upgrades over the 888. The 8G1 will be running on ARM v9 IP with ARM’s new CPU design. Over the 888, it will have one Cortex-X2, three A710 and four A510 running at 3GHz, 2.5GHz and 1.8GHz respectively. It is paired with the next gen Adreno GPU. Qualcomm claims that the 8G1 will offer 20% performance uplift and 30% more power efficient in the CPU and 30% and 25% in the same manner in the gaming side of things.

They also featured their newest Hexagon DSP which improves AI performance by up to 4 times over the 888. The chip also supports four 16bit channels of 3200MHz LPDDR5 RAM.

For the cameras, it is now upgraded on an 18bit Spectra Triple ISP up from 14bit from the Spectra 580 of last year. It can still shoot 200MP, 12MP at 240fps, 8K at 30 fps, 4K at 120fps, 720p at 960fps and 8K HDR video with 64MP burst capture.

The 8G1 also has the Snapdragon X65 5G modem that can handle 10Gbps downlink speeds and 3Gbps uplink.

All of these is built on Samsung’s 4nm process which is an upgrade from the 888’s Samsung 5nm but inferior to MediaTek’s 4nm TSMC on their Dimensity 9000.

The preliminary list of manufacturers that will use the chip will be Motorola, Xiaomi, Realme, OPPO, OnePlus, ASUS, iQOO, Blackshark, Honor, Nubia, Redmi, Sharp, Sony, Vivo and ZTE. Some of them actually has confirmed and posted on their official social media channels regarding their Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 device such as Xiaomi and Realme. Xiaomi is expected to be the first manufacturer to release it commercially with their upcoming Xiaomi 12 series.