Snapdragon 8 Gen1: Everything You Need To Know

Alex Katouzian, SVP & General Director, MCI, Qualcomm, showing the new Snapdragon 8 Gen i SoC

At its SnapdragonSummit in Hawaii, Qualcomm has announced its next-generation smartphone hardware platform, with a significant naming rebrand: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

Qualcomm has detailed the proper name changes on November 22, 2021, only if you missed it, "Snapdragon" is at present a standalone make separated from the Qualcomm brand. This change might make Snapdragon even more consumer-friendly and focus people'south attending on the platform and not the company. Yet, the scrap naming is the more of import function.

Instead of using numbers such as Snapdragon 888 (terminal year's model), the new Snapdragon is called "Snapdragon 8 Gen1". You tin expect lower-tiers Snapdragon chips to follow the aforementioned naming scheme, and this makes the differentiation between "Tiers" (from low to high-finish) and "Generation" (which year). In this example, "8" is the highest tier for smartphone chips, and Gen1 designates the 2022 generation.

The Snapdragon eight Gen 1 flake is manufactured with Samsung's 4nm semiconductor process, one of the nigh advanced available, but in that location'southward stiff contest from TSMC as well.

*all photograph credits: Eliane Fiolet, co-founder, Ubergizmo.

Snapdragon Sight: massive camera calculating improvements

Let's start with the most heady aspect of Snapdragon eight Gen 1 for consumers: the camera.

All the camera features are now grouped under the same roof, chosen "Snapdragon Sight," then wait us to reference this more oft in the future. The name is a change in communication and not a new hardware unit. It is part of the general trend at Qualcomm to brand things less technical and more purpose-driven.

The raw numbers are boundless: 240 photos per second, 3.2 Gigapixel/sec, 8K HDR x+ video recording, and a new eighteen-bit triple prototype signal processor. With Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Qualcomm re-affirms its delivery to mobile photography, at present the #1 concern for smartphone buyers.

There's so much that we'll publish more details in a dedicated Snapdragon Sight article, but in the context of this platform overview let's focus on the hardware potential first. The numbers to a higher place are primarily enabled by the new triple xviii-bit ISP, and these specs reveal the overarching theme for the new camera architecture is: optimize optical flow.

Optical flow can be thought of as the physical quantity of light (= paradigm data) gathered through the lens. Using a long exposure, having a larger sensor, having a larger aperture all increase optical flow.

Nonetheless, non all this physical optical flow can be exploited digitally. There are tradeoffs betwixt long exposure and blur or over-exposition. It means that the electro-optics (sensor+lens) are non always fully utilized.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 camera architecture is built to maximize the camera'due south electro-optics hardware and brand the well-nigh of what that hardware tin capture. Electro-optics are limited mainly past physics, which is why OEMs are in a camera hardware/specs artillery race, equally measured by our CAMERA HW benchmark.

"MAXIMIZES OPTICAL Menstruum"

However, what's captured past the electro-eyes could be amend utilized if you take the necessary compute capabilities (and know-how). For instance, this new Snapdragon maximizes optical menstruation past making it possible to utilise nearly 100% of the captured light (every bit spliced HDR staggered photography) to levels never seen before.

We expect this to translate into significantly better HDR photography, which can capture extremely high contrast scenes in a life-like fashion without losing details in dark regions or over-exposing things in bright areas.

Snapdragon eight Gen 1's ISP is powerful plenty to handle 8K HDR10+ videos with three exposures per frame. That's an insane imaging performance level supported past the rest of the Snapdragon eight Gen 1 compages (AI, GPU, CPU, etc.).

For notwithstanding photography, a unmarried HDR night photo tin can now exist composed of 5X more frames, taken at diverse ISO to grade a full xviii-bit HDR RAW prototype that is and then saved every bit is or as a .jpg file. If subjects move during a multi-frame photo, in that location'south hardware motion detection to help the camera deal with it at a much college speed and power-efficiency.

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With this level of performance, you'll conspicuously be limited by the sensor's functioning, not by the epitome computation speed. That's why it'south more important than e'er to be aware of your electro-optics photographic camera hardware capabilities (we can help because postal service-capture calculating tin magnify the quality of the incoming data.

The key takeaway is that Snapdragon 8 Gen one is a computational imaging Godzilla, and I tin can't wait to see what kind of cameras systems OEMs volition build. You lot tin can exist assured that whatsoever data comes in, this platform will make the best of it.

Organisation Performance

This is the usual hot topic for any new generation of processors, and, of class, Qualcomm has improved all aspects of system performance.

Kryo CPU cluster

The new Kryo CPU cluster is now based on one ARM Cortex X2 (Prime, 3Ghz), three Cortex A710 (2.5Ghz), and four Cortex A510 (one.8GHz). The updated ARMv9 CPU core architecture drives most of the operation boost, simply the slight increase in CPU frequency besides brings an extra nudge.

Overall, Qualcomm estimates this new CPU cluster to be 20% faster and 30% more ability-efficient than Snapdragon 888, the previous Android market leader. The 30% power-efficiency number is surprisingly high, and without further explanations, I'll assume that it is based on a best-example scenario.

There's likewise 50% more than L3 cache that is at present 6MB large to avoid expensive DDR memory access whenever possible. The memory system itself seems to remain unchanged.

Graphics and gaming

The new Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU) is said to be xxx% faster while being 25% more power-efficient, which raises the baseline performance for nearly all apps that depend on the GPU, like games.

But Qualcomm goes further if developers are willing to put some effort into optimizations. For example, the Variable Rate Shading Pro (VRS Pro) characteristic allows controlling the Variable Shading using an image-based input. VRS means decreasing shading quality (to boost FPS) in places where gamers won't notice. Using image-based VRS gives even more than control to developers who know best "where" to apply VRS in their games.

Another fashion to enjoy high FPS gaming while saving bombardment is the new Adreno Frame Move Engine. As you can imagine, a 60 FPS game typically consumes twice the battery compared to a 30FPS one considering it computes 2X the number of game frames.

The new Adreno Frame Motility Engine is a frame interpolator that tin can brand 30FPS games announced every bit smooth every bit 60FPS ones. It seems to work similarly to what 120/240Hz televisions were doing by creating boosted 2D frames via an intelligent interpolation, which is much less energy-intensive than actually rendering a 3D scene.

Finally, in that location'south Snapdragon Studios, a programme nether which Qualcomm works closely with developers by providing lawmaking samples, libraries, analysis/communication, or perhaps implementing hardware-specific optimizations.

Developers often can't dive as deep into a vendor's hardware because technology resource (manpower) are scarce, or the required knowledge is proprietary. Qualcomm's help tin can tip the scales on high-profile projects and land Snapdragon users sizeable operation perks.

"COLOSSAL COMPOUND POTENTIAL PERFORMANCE BOOSTS FROM HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE IMPROVEMENTS"

Qualcomm mentioned bully examples of working with Epic to optimize well-known techniques, potentially widely used, in Unreal Engine. Using Snapdragon-specific optimizations, staples techniques such as screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) or temporal Anti-Aliasing (AA) got a 50%-lx% speed-up on the same hardware.

Qualcomm and Ballsy are now collaborating on Unreal Engine 5 optimizations.

When you lot add together upward everything we talked most, you can see colossal compound potential performance boosts from hardware and software improvements.

Although not completely new is a brilliant approach because if Qualcomm's competitors lack the resources, organization, and know-how to work at that level with developers, even having slightly better height performance might not be enough to trounce Snapdragon in actual games. In short, Qualcomm is earthworks a moat that helps keeping competitors at bay.

Artificial Intelligence speed-upwards

The AI performance saw a considerable jump, primarily due to the doubling of the computing capacity of the Hexagon processor but also thanks to the addition of 2X more than retention to store neural networks without having to splice and reload them.

Nigh AI benchmarks should evidence nearly double the functioning (i.7X according to Qualcomm), only it seems that in some cases, loading and unloading the neural network could cut the performance by half. That'due south why doubling the AI memory can aid tremendously and push button the gains to 4X.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Performance aside, it is clear that AI keeps permeating in all aspects of computing. Wherever at that place's a need for "perception" (recognize, understand, select, etc.) or tasks (denoising, de-compressing video, etc.) based on pattern recognition, AI tin can potentially aid.

Qualcomm displayed great technology demos, such as a more ability-efficient AI video decoding. Currently, this technique is experimental, merely the general idea is that you can sometimes supersede circuitous pieces of computing with more than power-efficient AI computing. AI would produce something that is non always identical but "close enough" that people won't notice.

For instance, that'due south how GPU Ray-Tracing denoising works on PC, and i has to acknowledge that these techniques are monumental and unbelievably constructive.

Another AI instance was the Tongue Processing demo that enables adjacent-gen smart assistants. A Good example is to surface the "most important notifications" since nosotros're bombarded. I'd love to meet an bodily implementation every bit there could be many corner-cases to this concept.

AI was previously used in short-bursts, but with workloads related to imaging (including video recording), the sustained throughput and performance now seems unbounded, so wait the AI processor to continue to balloon in size and compute capacity for years to come.

There's a 4th ISP (image signal processing) for "Always-on AI" in the Sensing Hub. The Sensing Hub is an ultra-low unit that e'er stays on and listens for your "OK Google" command, for example. With this Internet access provider, the phone can always "encounter" if yous're looking at the phone or if someone else is peeking at your screen from behind yous – without killing battery life.

The all-seeing Internet service provider opens the door for much-heightened security and privacy as i could eventually hide notifications or lock apps if someone else is looking at the screen. This is one of the near helpful features that's only impossible to implement without the Sensing Hub's Isp.

Connectivity

5G is peradventure the closest to the heart for Qualcomm, which has the nigh sophisticated broadband technology in the Premium segment. Everything presented was leading-edge, and of course, the latest WIFI-6E and Bluetooth protocols are included.

The 10 Gbps (theoretical) speed of Qualcomm's X65 5G Rel16 modem and RF solution was announced earlier this year but is now integrated into the Snapdragon 8 Gen ane chip. Qualcomm just revealed that it could use both sub-six and mmWave protocols in the aforementioned session to amass the bandwidth.

"MAXIMIZING YOUR 5G BROADBAND CONNECTION AT ALL TIMES"

Speed aside, you're essentially maximizing your 5G broadband connection at all times if your carrier has both sub-6 and mmWave back up. Sub-6 brings better average networks when compared to 4G LTE, but mmWave is 19X faster (than sub-6) in the real world, so this is a significant evolution.

Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm, showing a alive demo of upload speed for 5G mmWave

This twelvemonth, Qualcomm is communicating more than on uploads speed, which makes a lot of sense, given the rising in real-time communications and user-created content. The 8K video call with Verizon was dandy and shows how far mobile broadband has come in the past five years.

Security

Saritha Sivapuram, Senior Director, Product Management, Qualcomm presenting the Trust Direction Engine

The Snapdragon platform has integrated a dedicated Security Processor for some time, but there's a new Trust Management Engine that increases security and unlocks new possibilities such as minting NFTs from the device and more than.

The general idea is that any content creation could exist authenticated as unique, original, and belonging to the user. The Qualcomm cloud services support the validation, and from there, a record can be added in a blockchain (similar ETH), creating a new NFT, which tin can make its way to an NFT market.

"SAFER TO LOSE YOUR DIGITAL KEYS LOCKED BY YOUR Phone THAN YOUR Physical KEYS"

That would exist much simpler than electric current NFT workflows, but of course, it'southward not e'er easy to create artwork on a mobile. And perhaps that's why this characteristic will, without a uncertainty, make its style to Snapdragon PCs.

Security is often an obscure topic hidden from view, simply with Android Ready SE and platforms similar Snapdragon, information technology will be possible and more secure to digitize things similar keys, government IDs, and more.

In many ways, it would be much safer to lose your digital keys locked by your phone than your physical keys. The aforementioned is valid for IDs as their issuance might exist heavily validated and potentially verifiable in real-fourth dimension.

Determination

Snapdragon viii Gen 1 looks slap-up, and on paper, information technology has everything it needs to remain the top hardware platform for Android smartphones. I similar the advances in image computing and overall performance and security.

What Qualcomm is doing on the gaming front end makes a lot of sense, and I predict that these developer relations efforts will be very successful in terms of adoption by game developers. You'll detect that Ray-Tracing (RT) was not mentioned at all, but while I remember that RT for mobile is great for developers, it won't exist prepare for actual games for another year or 2 at all-time.

"Information technology HAS EVERYTHING Information technology NEEDS TO REMAIN THE TOP HARDWARE PLATFORM FOR ANDROID SMARTPHONES"

The 5G connectivity remains unequaled and is pretty much the best bachelor, perhaps until next year. That'due south always a reliable way to futurity-proof a multi-year phone buy considering networks are evolving very fast.

Finally, the photographic camera support is phenomenal, especially for 8K video, and multi-camera recording. Single-photographic camera photography remains limited past the lens and sensor, but every scrap of captured light tin exist utilized to its fullest.

Expect broad support from telephone makers, and from the looks of it, the start device will arrive before the end of the year. Stay tuned!

Filed in . Read more about Android, Editorspick, Processors, Qualcomm, Snapdragon, Snapdragon Height and SoC.

Source: https://www.ubergizmo.com/2021/12/snapdragon-8-gen1-overview/

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