Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is Here to Power Phones Not Made by Google

Qualcomm’s end-of-year Hawaii vacation for tech press kicked off this week, which means new Snapdragon announcements! The chipmaker did indeed bring us one big reveal today – the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, a chip that will power almost all of the major smartphones next year excluding Google’s Pixel line.

What should you know about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2? The 4nm chip (64-bit) and its Kryo CPU improves performance by 30% and allows for 40% more power efficiency compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Its Adreno GPU provides 25% faster performance and up to 45% better power efficiency as well.

In cameras, we’re getting 200MP photo capture support, as well as 8K HDR video capture in 10-bit HDR. When watching video, we are getting AV1 codec support for the first time with playback up to 8K HDR at 60fps.

It features ultra-low latency Bluetooth streaming (<48ms) of audio, Bluetooth 5.3, Spatial Audio with head tracking, and WiFi 7 with speeds up to 5.8Gbps. It has the new Snapdragon X70 5G modem too, with support for two 5G SIMs at once.

Cool, cool.

The first Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 devices will arrive before the end of the year. Companies like ASUS, Motorola, OnePlus, OPPO, Sony, and Xiaomi have already committed to using the chip at some point.

// Qualcomm