Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit Event Highlights: Powered by AI

Here's what we know so far about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and other launches at the Summit and what it means for upcoming Android devices
Venue of the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii
Venue of the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii

Given its laid-back reputation, Hawaii is an unlikely destination for the launch of high-performance flagship chips that power top-tier smartphones from Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and the like. Yet, year after year, this is Qualcomm’s preferred venue of choice for the Snapdragon Summit. Here, it launched the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip this week, among other key announcements in the computing and extended reality space. And just as 5G was a big theme over the past few years, this year the attention shifted to big leaps in the use of artificial intelligence to improve practically every function of the new chip – from features like simultaneous multi-language translation, customized wake words for invoking, and other AI-assisted camera capabilities. Here's what we know so far about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and other launches at the Summit and what it means for upcoming Android devices.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Smarts:  AI was big at this year’s Snapdragon Summit and for good reason. The AI Engine on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the fastest Qualcomm has built for its chips, with the tensor accelerator twice as large as before and the upgraded Hexagon processor now supporting a new tech called micro tile inferencing for speeding up neural network processing. According to Qualcomm, these contribute to a 4.35x jump in AI performance over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and an equally impressive 60% improvement in performance per watt efficiency. The latter is driven in large parts by support for the INT4 AI precision format. A faster AI engine on phones packing in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 should enable a bunch of new features like real-time multi-language translation or real-time video background blur – much like what Google’s trying to achieve with the decidedly mid-range but very AI-savvy Tensor G2 chipset. Qualcomm’s also adding a second AI processor to the Sensing Hub, which collects and analyses data in real-time to enable features like custom wake words for a specific app and even enables real-time sensor processing even when the phone is in sleep mode – say for scanning a QR code when the phone has just been retrieved from your pocket. 

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Performance: For Qualcomm’s latest premium chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 delivers when it comes to performance. Built on a 4-nanometer process, Qualcomm’s shifted from the 1-prime, 3-performance, 4-efficiency cores approach of before to one where the 8 Gen 2 has a high-end Cortex X3 ‘Prime’ core running at 3.2GHz assisted by 4 performance cores (2.8 GHz) and 3 efficiency cores (2.0 GHz). Qualcomm says its new CPU should be 35% faster and power consumption should be improved by 40% as compared to the 8 Gen 1. Given that we’ve seen improvements in battery life with the 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset, the 8 Gen 2 should see even bigger gains.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Gaming: As with the CPU, the Adreno graphics on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 also sees a bump up, with a 25% graphics gains and a 45% boost to power efficiency over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Building on the Snapdragon Elite Gaming program that aims to deliver console-quality gaming to smartphones, the 8 Gen 2 will be the first Qualcomm chipset to support real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing at a mere power draw of 5W. Ray tracing has been the benchmark for showing realistic light and reflections in graphically demanding games, and if the Oppo demo one saw at the event was any measure, bring it on! There’s even support for the Unreal Engine 5 Metahumans framework and Vulkan 1.3 support.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Camera: Cameras get a big boost with the new Cognitive ISP (Image Signal Processor) that uses an AI neural engine to recognize faces, facial features, clothes, hair, and the sky in the photo via what is called real-time semantic segmentation and optimise each aspect within the frame in real-time. The big leap this time around is that it’s purely hardware driven, so each pixel can be processed for lighting, and texture differently based on what real-world entity it represents. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 can support photo capture of up to 200MP and 8K HDR video capture – could we possibly see the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra with a 200MP main camera early next year? 

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Connectivity, Sound, and Security: The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 features the X70 modem with AI-assist (for optimised 5G performance) that launched earlier this year. However, now it supports 5G+5G dual sim dual active and Wi-Fi 7 support. Other Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 features include support for Qualcomm's Snapdragon Sound audio standard, which now offers support for spatial audio with dynamic head-tracking as well as 48kHz lossless music streaming support. Security comes via Snapdragon Secure, which promises the latest support for isolation, cryptography, key management, and attestation among other security features.

Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1

Qualcomm took the wraps off the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1, the company’s first built-for-AR platform for headgear, with the intent to provide OEMs the reference design for lighter and more stylish glass designs for augmented reality applications. The new design is made of three different components – an AR processor, an AR co-processor, and a connectivity module that connects the AR glasses to a host like a smartphone. Using this approach allows the glasses to offload computationally intensive tasks to the smartphone, letting the processors on the glass handle the latency-sensitive operations. This design also enables smaller, more flexible designs that look nothing like the bulky AR headsets that initially hit the market, thanks in part to the 40% smaller area it takes up and the less than 1W of power it consumes. There are a couple of reasons for that approach. Using a device like a smartphone lets the silicon on the glasses themselves offload more complex data-processing tasks to a smartphone (presumably one running one of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 chipsets) or a PC. That frees up the processors on the glasses to handle latency-sensitive perception data.

Qualcomm S5 and S3 Gen 2

Beyond mobiles, Qualcomm showed off the latest S5 and S3 Gen 2 platforms for audio gear, all of which promise improvements to spatial audio, lossless music streaming, and ultra-low latency streaming over Bluetooth. Spatial audio is natively supported in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip and Qualcomm’s push is to enable wireless earbuds to uptake this feature. Lossless streaming is expected to come with Bluetooth 5.3 and LE Audio specs, and the chips support the standard. Gaming latency has been dropped to less than 48 milliseconds between the phone and the earbuds, particularly critical for first-person shooters where the sound in your ear should match what’s happening on the screen. The S5 and S3 platforms also support Qualcomm's third-generation active noise cancellation features, which can switch between active noise cancellation to letting natural sounds filter in when you need to hear the outside world.

Qualcomm Oryon CPU 

There’s a new CPU in the works to replace the current Kryo processing Qualcomm uses but details are scarce on the new Oryon CPU that’s due to be brought to Windows computers next year — and like all things Snapdragon at the event — will be all about 5G and AI. Over time, Qualcomm expects to filter down the Oryon CPU to multiple Snapdragon products, including mobile, automotive, etc.

Disclosure: This columnist traveled to Hawaii on Qualcomm’s invitation to attend Snapdragon Summit 2022.

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