Qualcomm announces the tech that’ll power many 2023 flagship phones
Watch out for Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 appearing in devices very soon
Qualcomm has announced the second gen of its flagship phone hardware – Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will be appearing in stacks of flagship handsets as 2023 gets underway. These will include launches from Asus ROG, Honor, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Sony and Xiaomi. The first phones to feature the new hardware will appear next month and we know for Oppo, for example, that it will definitely be in the next Oppo Find X flagship.
Obviously there are impressive headline performance improvement figures to talk about; 25% better graphics, 35% percent better Kryo processing cores and 4x faster AI processing performance, too versus last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (though not the mid-year 8+ Gen 1 enhanced version). To these topline figures Qualcomm adds that the computing cores (based on ARM designs, of course) have a new microarchitecture that brings power efficiencies of around 40 percent. So there should be a decent real-world impact on your phone’s battery life.
But what’s really interesting is some of the underlying capabilities – the Spectra image processor is capable of realtime recognition of different objects within a frame, such as hair or clothes and can support 8K HDR video capture or stills up to an incredible 200 megapixels.
As in the last generation there’s support for lossless audio via Snapdragon Sound plus there’s spatial audio with head tracking where supported and now with super low latency of less than 48ms over Bluetooth. The platform can also support two 5G SIMs simultaneously (or 4G and 5G mixed SIMs).
And we’ve been hearing about Wi-Fi 6E coming into devices…the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the world’s first platform to support Wi-Fi 7 which won’t be in most devices for a while (which is part of Qualcomm’s FastConnect 7800 tech).
At its annual Snapdragon Summit event, Qualcomm also brought Adobe on stage to announce further Creative Cloud apps built for Windows devices that run Snapdragon. Photoshop and Lightroom have been available for some time on the platform, but they’re now going to be joined by other apps including Acrobat and Fresco.
Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief 
