The next-gen Snapdragon 8 mobile platform Gen 2 has arrived, and as expected, it’s fast, and offers significant leaps in performance over the previous Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1.
At the 2022 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm explAIned that their latest flagship mobile chipset has been purposely built for AI and has undergone some major architectural changes.
At the heart of the AI experience is the Qualcomm AI engine which is made up of the Adreno GPU, Spectra ISP, and Hexagon Processor. Qualcomm has now added a second AI processor that offers double the performance.
Overall, the Adreno GPU offers a performance improvement and power savings improvement of up to 25%. The Tensor accelerator has increased in size by 2X and Qualcomm has added a dedicated power delivery system. All of this leads to a 4.35X performance improvement and a 60% improvement per watt.
Camera
But it’s not just performance and AI improvements that are among the benefits of the Snapdragon 8 mobile platform Gen 2. The chipset also brings lots of real-world, practical benefits to your phone’s camera, such as “The Always sensing camera”.
For example, with “The Always sensing camera”, if your camera is turned off, but you place your camera up against a QR code, the camera will automatically sense it and load up the corresponding QR code.
Another practical use case is that if the camera senses that someone else is looking at your display, it will automatically mute notifications.
Qualcomm has also announced their first-ever cognitive ISP which is able able to receive context and supports a new ISP feature called real-time segmentation. This technology allows the camera to be able to see the world in layers, and this happens before you ever hit the capture button.
5G
The Snapdragon 8 mobile platform Gen 2 is the first and only 5G modem-RF System to have a dedicated AI processor. This helps with 5G performance. To that effect, it’s able to support download speeds of 10gbps and up to 3gbps. It also supports 5G dual sim, where both sims can be actively connected to 5G simultaneously. The chipset also supports fast global Wifi up to 5.8gbps and dual Bluetooth.
Gaming

At the summit, Oppo joined Qualcomm on stage to show off mobile ray tracing on the Snapdragon 8 mobile platform Gen 2 which the two companies have been collaborating on. The addition of ray tracing on Snapdragon is going to be a huge deal for gamers.
Ray Tracing allows video games to be more immersive thanks to more realistic lighting effects. Until now, ray tracing has been something that has been limited to PC and console games.
You can expect to see the Snapdragon 8 mobile platform Gen 2 showing up in flagship smartphones starting in 2023.