Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 flagship chip announced! Know what it can do

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the flagship mobile chip for high-end smartphones, promising notable performance gains over Snapdragon 888. Here are all the details.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 smartphones will start coming out in late 2021, with Xiaomi announcing its reservation for the Xiaomi 12 series.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 – that is the name you will get used in 2022 when buying flagship Android phones. Qualcomm has revamped its branding this year and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the first in the new series. In reality, it is essentially a successor to the Snapdragon 888 and brings in the usual annual gains in performance.

Smartphones using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will start coming out in late 2021, with Xiaomi announcing its reservation for the Xiaomi 12 series. iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, Oppo, Realme, Redmi, Black Shark, Honor, OnePlus, SHARP, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE have also confirmed launching phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in 2022.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1: New name, same old speed gains

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is based on the Armv9 architecture and uses the 4nm manufacturing process. There's an octa-core processor, with a single 3GHz Cortex X2 super performance core; this is accompanied by three 2.5GHz Cortex-A710 cores. There are four Cortex A510 cores clocked at 1.5GHz for efficient tasks.

This setup is said to offer a 20 percent boost in raw performance and a 30 percent boost in power efficiency. The updated GPU is said to offer 30 percent faster graphics processing and 25 percent improvement in power efficiency.

The 5G modem sees an upgrade in the form of the Snapdragon X65, which supports both mmWave and sub-6GHz 5G network connectivity. The modem can support speeds of up to 10GBps, although the world is yet to catch up with that levels of mobile data speed. There's support for Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth LE audio.

As part of its Snapdragon Sight, the Spectra ISP now supports 18-bit processing, which with its improved processing speeds can take 240 12MP photos in a second, or shoot 8K HDR10+ video as well as 18-bit RAW files. A fourth new “Always-On ISP allows the camera to run with extremely low power consumption so users can experience always-on face unlocking and locking if your face isn't present for heightened privacy,” says Qualcomm.

AI performance gets a boost with the 7th Gen AI engine which is claimed to be four times faster than older model while being 1.7 times more power efficient. The AI engine is used for a improving mobile gameplay experiences on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, something akin to the NVIDIA DLSS tech.

Lastly, security sees a boost too with a the Trust management Engine that supports Android Ready SE standard, and can hold critical data such digital car keys, IDs, wallet data, and more. The chip also has support iSIM.