Qualcomm is one of the major players in the chip manufacturing industry. The market usually looks forward to the arrival of Qualcomm’s latest flagship processor. According to Qualcomm’s CEO, Cristiano Amon, the next-generation flagship processor after the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 is the Snapdragon 8 Gen2. He explained that the reason why the three-digit designation of the Snapdragon 8 series chips was canceled is to simplify consumers’ cognition. With the new naming system, there is no need to identify or confirm the size of the numbers, users only need to know the generation.
However, we do not know how many generations will be in a particular series. Obviously, Qualcomm will not want to be stuck at the Snapdragon 8 series. It appears that after a couple of generations in the “8 Series”, there should be a “Snapdragon 9 Series”.
Regarding unreleased products, Anmon also reiterated that the PC processor designed by the acquired Nuvia team will be sampled in 2022 and commercialized in 2023. He said that Nuvia is Qualcomm’s best CPU design team. Anmon claims that the goal of this processor is to regain the advantage in performance. Furthermore, the chip not only has good entertainment performance but also serves commercial or enterprise-level needs. However, he was not specific about the professional needs of this chip.
Snapdragon 8 Gen1 technical specs
The CPU keeps the three-cluster design and is perfectly in line with the previous leaks. There is a Prime Core with an ARM Cortex-X2 core with a 3.0 GHz clock speed. There are also three “supporting” performance cores based on the newer ARM Cortex-A710 standard. Those will run at 2.5 GHz. Finally, we have four efficiency cores that will also sport the new ARM Cortex-A510 standard running at 1.8 GHz.
Overall, the new CPU will be 20 percent faster than the one in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. It will also reduce power usage by up to 30 percent. That certainly is a significant upgrade. The upcoming Xiaomi 12, for example, will be 20 percent faster than its predecessor.
Now the next big thing is on the GPU part. The new chipset introduced the new Adreno 730 GPU with a 30 percent performance boost and up to 25 power-saving thanks to its new architecture. Qualcomm developed three Elite Gaming features, one of which will allow developers to strike a balance between performance and power efficiency. The Adreno Frame Motion Engine allows the GPU to render a game at double the frame rate while using the same amount of power. Alternatively, it can keep the FPS the same while cutting power draw by half.
The set of new features also include desktop-class volumetric rendering. It is used for dramatic lighting effects, the god rays that level designers seem to love so much. Also new is Variable Rate Shading Pro, an image-based VRS that should streamline the integration of VRS into more games. According to the chipmaker, there are already many partnerships with solid game developers to extract the best of the new hardware.
