Qualcomm Announced Its Snapdragon 8 Platform for All the Next Non-Google Phones

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit is taking place this week in Hawaii and the company did as it always does at this event, it announced the new high-end chip for smartphones for the upcoming year. Please welcome in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

I’ll keep this short, because smartphone chip talk is only going to make my COVID booster body hurt worse. Here’s what you need to know in the briefest of Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 overviews:

• 4nm chip: This an octa-core, 64-bit 4nm chip referred to internally as SM8450 and it has some sort of new next-gen Adreno GPU that Qualcomm doesn’t appear to want to name. Qualcomm says to expect a 20% performance boost from its Kryo cores and up to a 30% power saving, while the new Adreno chip is at 30% faster and with 35% power savings.
• X65 5G modem: This is the fancy and new integrated 5G modem that will bring you all the connections to all the 5Gs. We’re talking up to 10 Gigabit downloads in the absolute perfect setting, as well as WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E. If anything, just know that it’ll be better than whatever 5G modem is in the Pixel 6 that Samsung made.
• Snapdragon Sight cameras: The new 18-bit ISP that Qualcomm is using can capture a ridiculous amount of data (4000x more camera data that the Snapdragon 888 in dynamic range, color, and sharpness) at speeds up to 3.2 gigapixels per second. It has a special Bokeh Engine for your portrait shots , shoots 8K HDR video, and has a feature that keeps your selfie camera always-on…for security purposes.
• Gaming: There are over 50 Snapdragon Elite Gaming features baked in that’ll bring you “ultra-smooth responsiveness,” HDR scenes, and desktop-level performance.
• Sound: In the sound department, we have Bluetooth 5.2 and Snapdragon Sound, which is Qualcomm aptX Lossless Technology for CD-quality audio.

As for when we’ll see the first phones running the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, it should be very soon. Motorola has confirmed that it is working on a new high-end phone, as well as a 5G wearable. OPPO (or OnePlus) also confirmed a Q1 2022 launch of various smartphones running 8 Gen 1. You can bet that Samsung will use this chip too with the Galaxy S22. Basically, only Google’s Pixel 7 is unlikely to have it, thanks to Google Tensor.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1!