Snapdragon 8 Is Simply Too Cool for US Carriers to Consider
You know what's cool in mobile? Hopefully, the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+. Qualcomm's latest flagship chip promises notable power efficiency improvements over the existing Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, meaning less heat plus better battery life and overall performance.
Qualcomm today announced its annual midcycle refresh for its mobile chipsets, with the Snapdragon 8+ and 7 Gen 1 both coming to phones later this year.
The Snapdragon 8+ is an update to the Snapdragon 8 seen in Samsung's Galaxy S22 series. It gets a 10% performance bump, but its biggest boost is up to a 30% improvement in power efficiency. Qualcomm frames that as a boost for battery life (80 more minutes of video streaming versus the existing 8 Gen 1), but it'll also help manufacturers make phones that can hold consistent performance without overheating, which has been a problem in 8 Gen 1 devices so far.
The 8+ will be accompanied by the 7 Gen 1, an update to Qualcomm's 7 Series processors, which are popular in phones mostly in Asia, in the $300-$500 range.
The Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 boosts GPU performance by 20% over the previous 7-series chipset and allows for 200-megapixel still photo capture. It has a new X62 modem(Opens in a new window) that supports dual-active 5G SIMs, the first in a 7-series chipset. (The 8 Gen 1 also has dual-active 5G SIMs.)
The X62 supports less 5G bandwidth than the 8 Gen 1's X65 modem: four mmWave carriers as opposed to eight, and 120MHz of sub-6GHz spectrum as opposed to 300MHz. But it'll support all the new bands for AT&T and Dish, for example, which weren't in older chipsets.
The new Snapdragon 8+ and 7 Gen 1 are mostly targeted at the vibrant mobile markets of Europe and Asia, where a dozen or more different manufacturers fight it out
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