On the morning of November 16, Sina Science and Technology News, at today's Snapdragon Technology Summit held in Hawaii, the United States, and Sanya, China, Qualcomm announced the second generation of Snapdragon 8 mobile flagship platform. The main features are: performance improvement, network upgrade, specially designed for AI, and support for 5G dual card dual pass.
The overall performance of Kryo CPU of the second generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform (code named SM8550) has increased by 35%, and the energy efficiency has increased by 40%. Specifically, the second generation Snapdragon 8 platform uses a Cortex-X3 super core CPU with a maximum main frequency of 3.2GHz, four performance cores with a maximum main frequency of 2.8GHz, three A510 efficiency cores with a maximum main frequency of 2.0GHz, and an 8MB L3 cache. The second generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform supports LP-DDR5x 4200MHz and USF 4.0, with a maximum memory density of 16GB.
In terms of GPU, the performance of Adreno GPU of the second generation Snapdragon 8 has been improved by 25%, and the energy efficiency has been improved by 45%. This year's Adreno GPU supports Vulkan 1.3 API for the first time, and Vulkan's support performance has increased by 30%. At the same time, it supports OLED aging compensation and the Chinese standard of HDR Vivid. In addition, the second generation Snapdragon 8 platform supports the new Elite Gaming game optimization technology, including real-time hardware accelerated ray tracing technology, and supports the illusion engine 5.
Like the first generation Snapdragon 8 platform last year, the second generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform adopts a 4-nanometer process process, which is likely to be delivered to TSMC as the Snapdragon 8+platform.
At the press conference, Qualcomm stressed that the biggest highlight of the second generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform is AI intelligence, which is a flagship mobile platform specially built for AI. The second generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform is equipped with an upgraded Hexagon processor, in which the size of the Tensor is doubled, and a dedicated small block acceleration power supply system is used to bring users faster natural language processing and AI photography functions. Qualcomm's AI engine performance has been improved by up to 4.35 times, and its energy efficiency has been improved by 60%. It is the world's first mobile terminal to support the operation of INT4 data bit width.
In addition, Qualcomm has also built dual AI processors into the sensor hub of the second generation Snapdragon 8 platform, which has doubled AI performance and increased memory by 50%, making it the first ever perceptive camera with AI support. The Spectra cognitive image processor of the second generation Snapdragon 8 platform supports photography and 8K 10bit HDR video capture of up to 200 million pixels.
The X70 5G baseband chip of the second generation Snapdragon 8 is the first RF chip integrated with AI processor. The 5G downlink speed is 10Gbps, and the uplink speed is 3.5Gbps. It is also the first mobile platform to support downlink four carrier aggregation, and also the first to support 5G dual card dual pass mobile platform. This function has a special practical significance for users in the Chinese market who have already popularized the 5G network.
The FastConnect 7800 mobile connection system of the second generation Snapdragon 8 platform supports the world's first commercial Wi Fi 7 solution. It is the only Wi Fi 7 solution that supports high-frequency multi connection concurrency. It supports the world's fastest Wi Fi up to 5.8Gbps and the world's lowest Wi Fi delay lasting less than 2 milliseconds.
The first commercial equipment of the second generation Snapdragon 8 platform is expected to be released at the end of this year. Major global OEMs and brands will use this flagship mobile platform, including Xiaomi, vivo, OPPO, Motorola, Glory, Sony, ZTE, Nubia, etc.
It is worth mentioning that this year's Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit was held earlier than the previous beginning of December to the middle of November. It may also be to give Chinese partners more time to cope with the sales peak season of the Chinese Lunar New Year, because the Lunar New Year in 2023 is two weeks earlier than that in 2022.
In December last year, Qualcomm released the first generation of Snapdragon 8 mobile platform after the independence of the Snapdragon brand at the Snapdragon Technology Summit, ending the three digit naming period that had lasted for many years. In May this year, QUALCOMM released an upgraded version of the first generation Snapdragon 8+mobile platform, which increased the CPU frequency to 3.2GHz, performance and GPU by 10%. With the release of the second generation Snapdragon 8, Qualcomm has successively released three flagship mobile platforms in less than a year.
Although the global smartphone market shrank this year, Qualcomm's performance continued to grow. The just released third quarter (fourth quarter) financial report shows that Qualcomm's revenue in the current quarter increased by 22% year on year, and its net profit increased by 22% year on year. In Qualcomm's QCT (semiconductor chip) business unit in the quarter, the mobile phone business revenue reached $6.6 billion, up 40% year on year, and contributed 66% of the QCT business revenue.
In addition, QUALCOMM also announced at the summit that it would expand its in-depth cooperation with Adobe to support more creative experiences on many Snapdragon platform devices such as mobile, computing, XR, etc. Most notably, Adobe Fresco and Adobe Acrobat will natively support Windows PC devices with Snapdragon processors.
