Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 deep dive: Specs, features, and more

Another year, time for another flagship-grade Snapdragon mobile platform, although the Groundhog Day vibes are a little more poignant this year. Despite the new name, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the ninth major annual smartphone platform release in the flagship Snapdragon series. It’s also the 18th model in the 8-series, once you total up all the Plus and other variants. Just to make things more confusing, Qualcomm has also decided to drop numbering from its Adreno GPU, Hexagon DSP, and other assorted parts within the chip.

To mark the name change, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 boasts Qualcomm’s first Armv9 CPU cores, a beefed-up 18-bit triple image signal processor (ISP), and better than ever machine learning (ML) number-crunching capabilities. All pretty typical improvements, based on previous years, and there are a few smaller changes tucked away inside the SoC too. So let’s get into exactly what’s new and what we can expect from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

See also: What is an SoC? Everything you need to know

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 specs

With the announcement of Armv9 CPU cores early in the year, we already had a good idea about what to expect from 2022 flagship processors and smartphones, at least in this regard. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is powered by a single Cortex-X2 powerhouse CPU core clocked at a higher 3GHz than last year, two big Cortex-A710 cores at 2.5GHz, and four energy-efficient Cortex-A510 cores at a more modest 1.8GHz. Qualcomm is sticking with its tried and tested 1+3+4 tri-cluster CPU arrangement, rather than the slightly more experimental 2+2+4 set up in the Google Tensor.

Read more: Arm Cortex-X2, A710, and A510 deep dive

Qualcomm says we’re looking at a 20% performance improvement and 30% power saving compared to the CPU setup inside the previous generation Snapdragon 888. That’s nothing to be sniffed at but the performance is more conservative than Arm’s up to 30% performance gain estimate, once you take into account clock frequency and manufacturing process improvements. Although Qualcomm notes that it optimizes these cores with its own power and other systems, which may explain the bigger efficiency gains, rather than solely peak performance improvement. And to be fair to Qualcomm, better battery life is much more sought-after than raw number-crunching these days.

Qualcomm hasn’t given us cache sizes, which may put a cap on the performance gains of the Cortex-X2 versus its theoretical peaks. Although there is a 2x larger system cache, this was 3MB last-gen so we’re now assuming 6MB, which has some benefits for machine learning, as do the Cortex-X2 cores which are 2x as powerful at ML workloads.

When it comes to graphics, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 includes an unnumbered in-house Adreno GPU. Performance-wise, Qualcomm boasts an impressive 30% performance boost over its previous generation SoC and an equally newsworthy 25% power saving. Performance gains hit up to 60% when using the Vulkan API, although this might be more of a fix for previously less-than-ideal performance rather than a complete gamechanger for mobile gaming frame rates, and could be a big win for some emulators. Again, this will all help close the gap on Apple silicon but certainly won’t leapfrog it.

Snapdragon Elite Gaming features stick around from the previous year and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 incorporates three new ones. There’s the new Adreno Frame Motion engine that can double the frame rate without using any additional power or keep the same frame while reducing power consumption. It’s essentially a frame-interpolation implementation running directly on the GPU. We’ve seen similar MEMC frame smoothing ideas implemented in external display processors in other phones.

The latest Adreno core also supports “desktop-level” volumetric rendering for fancier graphics. There’s also VRS Pro, which integrates image-based frame processing into its variable-rate shading solution for notable performance and power consumption savings. There’s no ray tracing here if you’d been expecting something outlandish like that — the latest Adreno is still very much a mobile-oriented graphics component.

Performance improvements sound great on paper, but we’ll have to see what all this means for energy consumption in high-performance scenarios. Silicon vendors have been pu