Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1: Inside the Next Android Powerhouse

Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, its first chip in a new naming scheme and the likely processor in Samsung's US Galaxy S22 and the OnePlus 10 phone series.

“The new class of experiences Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 delivers can transform flagship devices with breakthrough 5G speeds, professional-quality cameras, intelligent personal assistants, and elite gaming rigs,” Qualcomm said in a blog post.

The 8 Gen 1 comes as formerly dominant Qualcomm faces stronger competition than ever. Apple's M-series processors in its new MacBook Pro laptops have set the bar for PC performance using ARM-based chipsets, swiftly eclipsing Qualcomm's three-year project to try to put its chips in Windows laptops. MediaTek is now the number-one chipset vendor by volume, and it just announced the Dimensity 9000, its first true competitor to the 8-series processors.

But this year also has new opportunities for Qualcomm, even in its traditional realm of smartphones, Qualcomm SVP Alex Katouzian says.

“It's Huawei not being in the business and that volume shifting over to the OEMs that we work with, on the most part … we're gaining a lot of the Huawei business that was HiSilicon [Huawei's in-house chipmaker], and is now shifting,” he says.

“Snapdragon 8 Gen 1” is the first in a new numbering system for Qualcomm. For the past 10 years, it's been numbering chips with three digits starting with 200, 400, 600, 700, and 800, based on their power. But the company is up to 888+, 780G, 695, and 480+, according to a Qualcomm slide, and since it doesn't want to change the first digits or switch to hex, it needed to do something. (Still, though, how cool would the Snapdragon 8FE be? Maybe just for old geeks.)

Qualcomm hasn't explained yet what it'll do when it needs to release multiple chips in the same series during the same year, such as this year when it released the 870, 888, and 888+.

Qualcomm is running out of numbers.
(Qualcomm)

We're going to have a lot of hands-on and testing of the new chipset over the next few days here at the Snapdragon Summit, but here are the initial details on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

The CPU Wars, They Begin Again

Qualcomm has long tried to get people to stop talking about CPUs. Apple is forcing its hand.

The all-purpose, Swiss Army knife of computing, the CPU does whatever needs to be done, but isn't necessarily built for any specific task. Over the past 10 years, Qualcomm has instead focused on chips for specific tasks: a very optimized sensor hub, or image signal processor, or AI unit. That makes sense in the power-constrained world of smartphones, as these specialized blocks are generally more power-efficient.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm fell back on using its partner ARM's CPU designs. There isn't even a specific slide about the CPU in my pre-briefing presentation! But then two things happened: MediaTek caught up, and Apple surpassed them.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has one ARM Cortex-A2 core running at up to 3GHz, three A710 cores and four A510 cores, giving it 20% better performance and 30% lower power consumption than the Snapdragon 888, says Qualcomm VP of product management Ziad Asghar.

The new Adreno GPU is 30% faster than in the Snapdragon 888, with 25% power savings, Qualcomm says.

A Snapdragon reference design held in a hand.
(Qualcomm)

On the other hand, I hate to mention it, but the MediaTek Dimensity 9000 launched last week has the exact same CPU core layout. And the Dimensity may in fact outperform the Snapdragon on pure CPU measures because of faster RAM support: while Qualcomm uses LPDDR5 memory at 3500Mbps, MediaTek can use, in theory, LPDDR5x memory at 7500Mbps.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has a bunch of other features that are better than the Dimensity 9000, but we're talking about CPU here.

We'll benchmark the new Snapdragon later this week and tell you how that really shakes out.

Meanwhile, Apple's M-series processors, with custom cores, have set the PC world on fire in ways that Qualcomm's Snapdragon for Windows chipsets have failed to do for the past three years. Some of that is because Apple controls its OS and toolsets, and has been able to transition its whole platform to ARM in a way Windows didn't. But some of it is just that the M-series CPUs are better, and PCs rely on pure CPU much, much more than phones do.

But there are more changes to come. Last year Qualcomm bought Nuvia, a startup formed by some of the engineers behind Apple's A-series processors. At an analyst event earlier this month, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the first chips using Nuvia custom cores will start sampling late in 2022 and be “competitive” with Apple's M-series processors.

“So now for us with the Nuvia asset on board and working with Microsoft even more close than we had before, the partnership will allow us to bring some sort of a virtual vertical capability into the Windows market, to enable that ecosystem to flourish the same way,” Katouzian says.

Since they're off-cycle, these CPUs would likely go into PC-centric chipsets first, potentially then followed by late 2023's Snapdragon 8 series.

Leading in Camera?

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has three 18-bit image signal processors (ISPs) that support up to three 36MP cameras shooting at once; 64 and 36MP dual cameras shooting at once; or a 108MP camera. For video, the chip supports 8K HDR video at 30 frames per second and 720p slow-mo at up to 960 frames per second.

A new ISP unit connected to the low-power sensing hub lets the camera turn on without waking up much of the rest of the system, for low-power Face ID-like experiences.

The Dimensity 9000 outperforms it on certain specs, but I'm not sure they're specs anyone wants. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 transfers 3.2Mpx/sec of data and supports up to 200MP photo capture; the Dimensity claims 320MP photo capture, which just seems excessive based on what I've been seeing in smartphones up until now.

The 8 Gen 1 really shines when it combines the ISP with the AI processor or other software, Qualcomm's Jud Heape says. Video bokeh (like on the Samsung Galaxy S21), dewarping wide-angle photos (like on the OnePlus 9 Pro), better focus and white-balance on faces of different skin tones (like on the Pixel 6) and dynamic range all get better thanks to combining the new ISP with other components, Heape says.

Of course, the proof is going to be in which components device makers decide to pick up. Samsung especially tends to insist on its own image-processing software, which sometimes works well and sometimes not very well at all (as we saw on the disastrous Galaxy S20 Ultra, which launched with serious focus problems.)

We'll have more opportunities to test the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 camera this week.

Driving AI Home

One of the more perpetually touted, perpetually perplexing units in a smartphone chipset, Qualcomm's AI engine has the “highest AI hardware performance in the industry,” according to the company, with 4x the performance of last year's unit.

“We've doubled the shared memory, we can run larger models, and we can do a lot more in terms of keeping the information in there,” Asghar says.

The name has changed, too. “Hexagon DSP” is gone now; instead we have the “Hexagon Processor” and “Qualcomm AI Engine.”

Measuring the performance of AI units is an extremely tricky task, and everyone seems to do it differently, using different AI workflows and problem sets. The best Qualcomm could offer is some examples of why you need one of these.

A lot of the AI applications work with the camera—filters, for instance, or video bokeh, or anything that requires scene analysis like smart HDR to properly expose badly lit human faces. One of the wilder, creepier uses is “sentiment analysis,” analyzing the content of messages to intelligently only push you notifications from people who are really agitated, for instance.

All the 5G

Snapdragon 5G announcements tend to be a little anticlimactic because the modems get announced earlier in the year—in this case, the X65, with its “10Gbps” promise. (You will not get 10Gbps.)

The most important X65 feature is 3x sub-6 5G carrier aggregation, which means operators with three different slices of 5G mid-band and low-band spectrum can combine them. (The previous X60 only had 2x sub-6 aggregation.)

This opens up opportunities for all three major US operators. Both Verizon and AT&T will likely have mid-band 5G airwaves both in the 3.45-3.55GHz band and the 3.7-4GHz band, and they'll want to combine those with 850MHz low-band for uplink range. That's three right there. T-Mobile is going with 600MHz and 2.5GHz, but its 2.5GHz holdings are split in half in some metro areas, making a setup of 600/2.5/2.5 potentially useful for T-Mobile.

Since we're keeping score, the Dimensity 9000 also has 3x carrier aggregation. But it still doesn't have millimeter-wave, the high-band, short-range system on which Verizon still heavily relies. If you want millimeter-wave—and Verizon certainly does—you still have to choose Qualcomm.

New millimeter-wave modules are coming to 8 Gen 1-based phones, Qualcomm SVP of engineering Durga Malladi says. The new modules are slimmer and smaller to be put into multiple locations in a device; they support higher power levels for better reception, and more frequency bands as mmWave networks roll out globally.

“There have been a lot of KPI improvements—new bands, and a lot of nip/tuck in terms of performance and power,” he says.

… And More

This being a recent Snapdragon, there are custom blocks all over the place. The Snapdragon 888 supports a new audio system and has new security elements as well. We'll delve into it more during this week at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit.