What They Say
Qualcomm has announced its latest APU, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 which adds hardware support for decoding AV1 video at 8K60fps with HDR support for HDR10+, HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision. (Qualcomm is adding AV1 support) Other codecs include H.264 (AVC), H.265 (HEVC), VP8 and VP9. The chip also supports 8K30P or 4K120P capture. Internal displays up to 4K60 or QHD+ at 144Hz can be used or up to 4K60Hz with 10 bit HDR externally.
Qualcomm said that the chip is optimised for new sensors including a new quad digital overlap HDR technology from Sony which is said to be fine-tuned for Snapdragon. The Samsung ISOCELL HP3 is the first 200-megapixel image sensor optimised for Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
The platform will support 5G+5G/4G Dual-SIM Dual-Active, which allows the use of two 5G SIMs at once, the first chip to do this. Other features include Wi-Fi 7 for low latency and dual Bluetooth connectivity. The chip also has a low latency (48ms) Bluetooth streaming mode for gaming with a voice back-channel to allow better communication with other players. It also features real-time hardware accelerated ray tracing and a new Adreno GPU with 25% better performance and 45% better power efficiency.
The chip is said to use a 4nm process node.
What We Think
Qualcomm is reported to have previously said that the next Samsung Galaxy S23 smartphone due next year will exclusively use Qualcomm APUs rather than the mixture of Snapdragons & Samsung’s own Exynos chips in different regions.
There’s a full specification for this chip here. (BR)
