With the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Qualcomm has presented its new top processor for smartphones. The devices should run much longer or work much faster. There are also high-speed photo features and the latest wireless generation. These are the details.
Qualcomm presented its new top processor for next year’s high-end smartphones at the Snapdragon Tech Summit in Hawaii today. It’s called “Snapdragon 8 Gen 1”, where Gen 1 stands for “first generation”. Qualcomm is thus abandoning its well-known naming scheme, in which smartphone chips were designated with three-digit numbers – most recently Snapdragon 888, before Snapdragon 865.
In terms of performance, the new System on a Chip (SoC) should put all previous models in the shade: Compared to the Snapdragon 888, Qualcomm promises significantly more performance with the same power consumption (30% for graphics performance, 20% for the CPU). Viewed differently, this means that the new chip uses less energy while maintaining the same performance (25% less for the graphics, 30% less for the CPU). That is a good thing, because the 888 was noticeable negatively on the top smartphones of last year due to its hunger for energy.
It will also be exciting to see how the SD 8 Gen 1 will fare in benchmarks in terms of “sustainable performance”. This means whether the chip still delivers approximately the same performance as at the beginning of the measurements, even after a long period of operation under full load, or whether it gets so hot that it has to be operated at a lower clock rate. In the past, this “sustained performance” was always a strength of Qualcomm SoCs, but we did see in tests on some smartphone models with the Snapdragon 888 that it only achieved around 60% of the initial performance after 20 benchmark runs .
Qualcomm is also stepping up the hardware blocks for artificial intelligence (AI) applications with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1: Compared to the previous model, the AI should work up to four times faster.
The chip is manufactured using the 4nm process – these tiny structures are one of the reasons why the SoC works faster with the same power consumption or requires less power with the same performance.
Always-on camera
An extremely important part of a SoC is the image signaling processor (ISP). There are several of them in the SD 8 Gen 1: As usual with the 888, three ISPs will take care of the processing of the image sensor data and are supposed to set new standards: The ISPs in the 8 Gen 1 work with 18-bit color depth per basic color instead of the previous 14-bit – theoretically, color nuances that are up to 4000 times finer can thus be represented. The ISP should also be able to process 240 photos with a resolution of 12 megapixels per second – this should allow very impressive slow-motion recordings to be made. In addition, the night mode should work much better than before.
Further features of the ISPs: record 8K videos with high dynamic range (HDR) while simultaneously taking photos with 64 megapixels while recording 8K video, and in combination with the AI engine of the chip, significantly better auto focus, auto exposure setting and auto- Make face recognition possible than before.
A real novelty is a fourth, small ISP that Qualcomm is building into the “Sensing Hub”. This area of the SD 8 Gen 1 houses functions that run continuously in the background with minimal energy consumption, for example a voice recognition function so that the smartphone wakes up automatically when the user speaks “Hey Google” or other key terms. Until now, the energy consumption of the combination of camera sensor and ISP was far too high to keep it active at all times. Qualcomm is now promising continuously active video surveillance. One possible application would be face recognition that is always active to unlock the smartphone, or that the smartphone automatically switches off the display or switches to the lock screen if the active user is a stranger.
In practice, that is certain, but how comfortable many potential users feel at the thought that their smartphone is watching them all the time while they are doing everything is not an easy question to answer.
5G and super fast wifi
The SD 8 Gen 1 has an integrated 5G modem of the latest generation. It supports download speeds of up to 10 GBit / s – which a smartphone cannot achieve with the frequency ranges used in Germany. The X65 modem masters all 5G technologies currently and in the near future that are important: Voice over New Radio, 5G standalone, channel bundling in 5G uplink, 5G downlink carrier aggregation (with a bandwidth of up to 1 GHz in the mm-wave spectrum and at least 300 MHz Bandwidth in the “Sub 6” frequency range used by us in Germany), dynamic spectrum sharing – and of course all “old cellular technologies from 2G to 3G up to 4G.
The other communication features of the new Qualcomm SoC are convincing: It already supports the extended Wifi 6 version, called WIFI 6E, which can again provide a speed boost by using the spectrum at 6 GHz – theoretically up to 3.6 GBit / s be possible. Bluetooth 5.2 is also on board, as is audio transmission via the low-energy mode, which should ensure longer runtimes for headphones.
However, users have to realize that a smartphone with an SD 8 Gen will not necessarily offer all of these functions – the manufacturers who install the chip decide how much of them actually reaches the user.
First smartphones this year?
According to Qualcomm, many well-known smartphone brands have already opted for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, including Honor, Motorola, OnePlus, OPPO, Realme, Sony and Xiaomi. We look forward to getting them to our test lab.
In the following list you will always find the best smartphones from the test laboratory. You can find all tested smartphones in our full list of the best.
Smartphones in the test
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G
BestCheck offer Performance (1.3)
Equipment (1.3)
Battery (1.2)
Display (1.1)
Camera (1.0)
Appstore (1.0)
Apple iPhone 13 Pro
BestCheck offer Performance (1.0)
Equipment (1.5)
Battery (1.1)
Display (1.0)
Camera (1.5)
Appstore (1.0)
Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
BestCheck offer Performance (1.0)
Equipment (1.5)
Battery (1.1)
Display (1.0)
Camera (1.5)
Appstore (1.0)
Samsung Galaxy S21 Plus 5G
BestCheck offer Performance (1.3)
Equipment (1.3)
Battery (1.5)
Display (1.1)
Camera (1,2)
Appstore (1.0)
Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G
BestCheck offer Performance (1.4)
Equipment (1.3)
Battery (1.1)
Display (1.4)
Camera (1.3)
Appstore (1.0)