Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 is here to power midrange Androids! Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 for flagships

Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 have been announced by Qualcomm as its latest mobile chipsets. All details here.

Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is Qualcomm's most powerful chip for mobile platforms right now. 

Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chips are here! After being in the rumours for long, Qualcomm has finally unveiled these two chips to the world. The Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 kickstarts a new series of chips, succeeding the Snapdragon 778G from last year. The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip is kind of a mid-life upgrade for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, offering slight upgrades to performance and efficiency. Both chips will be available in commercial phones launching over the next few weeks.

Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 features at a glance

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 is a 4nm chip, just like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The CPU is an octa-core unit clocked up to 2.4GHz and is using the Adreno 662 GPU. Compared to the Snapdragon 778G chip, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 will offer 20 percent faster graphics performance and 30 percent faster AI performance. The chip can handle up to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

Gamers will find this chipset more suitable for their needs, considering that it brings the Adreno Frame Motion Engine. This promises to offer double frame rates in games but will have the same kind of power consumption as the Snapdragon 778G.

The chip also gets a new Spectra triple ISP that can support upto 200MP photos and 4K HDR video recording. It can also do 10-bit HEIC still photos and HEVC video recording. The Snapdragon X62 5G models allows yp to 4.4Gbps download speeds and supports dual standby 5G connectivity. There's also support for Wi-Go 6E along with Bluetooth 5.3. Phones can also make use of Snapdragon Sound and Qualcomm's aptX codec support.

Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 features

The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip is based on the TSMC 4nm process and is promising notable power efficiency — an issue with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. To justify the “+” moniker, Qualcomm has improved the CPU performance by 10 percent but enhanced the power efficiency by 30 percent. This is despite the main Cortex-X2 super performance core now being able to reach 3.2Ghz clock speed. The three Kryo Gold cores are boosted to 2.5GHz and the four Silver cores are boosted to 2GHz.

Even the GPU performance improves by 10 percent and the power efficiency improves by 30 percent. The AI performance has also improved power efficiency figures of 20 percent. In total, the overall power efficiency has improved by 15 percent. Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 8+ gen 1 powered phones can now stream video for 1 hour 30 minutes more than a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 powered phone.

Phones using the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip will arrive from July 2022 and some of the brands using this chip include Asus ROG, Black Shark, HONOR, iQOO, Lenovo, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, OSOM, Realme, Red Magic, Redmi, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE. That's a lot of high flagships and gaming phones coming our way over the rest of the year.