What just happened? During Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit 2022 conference in Hawaii, the wireless specialist introduced its latest premium mobile platform that'll power the next generation of flagship Android smartphones. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform is built on 4nm process technology and is comprised of a Kryo CPU featuring one prime core clocked at up to 3.2 GHz, four performance cores running at up to 2.8 GHz and three efficiency cores that can hit speeds of up to 2.0 GHz.
According to the chipmaker, the new Kryo chip delivers 35 percent faster performance and 40 percent better power efficiency than its predecessor.
The Adreno GPU, meanwhile, is the first mobile platform to support Vulkan 1.3 APIs alongside a host of other APIs including OpenGL ES 3.2 and OpenCL 2.0 FP. It also supports real-time hardware accelerated ray tracing, Unreal Engine 5 and Epic's MetaHuman framework. Qualcomm claims it pushes 25 percent faster graphics rendering and is up to 45 percent more power efficient than before.
An upgraded Qualcomm Hexagon Processor is said to deliver up to 4.35 percent increased AI performance, no doubt resulting in faster language translation and AI camera features.
Elsewhere, you will find Qualcomm's own Snapdragon X70 5G modem along with support for 5G dual-SIM dual-active (DSDA) tech, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3 LE, spatial audio with head tracking and more. The platform supports LP-DDR5x memory at speeds up to 4,200 MHz with capacities up to 16GB.
Oddly enough, the specs sheet mentions support for 8K video capture at up to 30 frames per second, yet on-device display support maxes out at 4K @ 60 Hz or QHD+ @ 144 Hz. Your only option here for playback in native 8K is through an external display.
Qualcomm said the first commercial deliveries of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform to partners including Asus, Motorola, OnePlus, Sony and Xiaomi are expected by the end of 2022. Notably, Samsung was not on the shortlist of OEM partners - make of it what you will.