Recently, Qualcomm announced their new flagship SoC entrant for mobile devices this 2023 and even later this year. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset gives boost on all aspects compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. 

The SoC announced by the San Diego firm has a part number of SM8550-AB. This may mean that there are other SKUs, possibly a Plus variant. The chip is assembled by TSMC on their 4nm node. 

First, Qualcomm brought efficiency and performance boost claims over the 8 Gen 1. While the 8 Gen 2 may have similar running frequencies compared to the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, it’s CPU core composition isn’t. For starters, Qualcomm made a difference to its tri-cluster setup. From 1+3+4, they went with a 1+4+3 configuration for this generation. The Kryo Prime core based on the ARM Cortex X3 is running at 3.2GHz. The four performance cores runs at 2.8GHz in which the four are divided to two separate microarchitectures, two A715s and two A710s, lastly three low power cores based on ARM Cortex A510 runs at 2GHz. They promise up to 35% more raw power and 40% more efficient.

The GPU on the other hand is promised to bring 25% better performance and 45% less power consumption. The new Adreno GPU, internally called as Adreno 740, brings support for hardware accelerated ray tracing. It can run displays of up to 2K at 144Hz and 4K at 60Hz. It can also do video decoding of up to 8K at 60fps.

Other features of the SoC include support for LPDDR5X memory, a triple 18bit ISP, 200MP sensor support, 8K HDR 30fps and a Snapdragon X70 5G modem. Further detailing that, it can support 10Gb/s download and 3.5Gb/s upload speeds. The FastConnect 7800 brings WiFi 7 with up to 5.8Gb/s download and Bluetooth 5.3. AI performance is now improved by up to 4.35x thanks to its new Hexagon DSP. 

Phonemakers to launch a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devices are but not limited to ASUS, Honor, Redmagic, ZTE, Xiaomi, Meizu, vivo, Sony, Redmi, OPPO, Nubia, Motorola, OnePlus, Sharp, ASUS ROG and iQOO. Weirdly enough, no mention of Samsung which is expected to have the chip on the S23 series. 

Phones with the chip are expected to hit retail before the year ends, atleast in China.