The New Next generation Chipset : Snapdragon 8 Gen 1

Qualcomm has announced the latest generation chipset for mobile phones. Compared to the Snapdragon 888 (Plus), the CPU part gains 20% performance and 30% power savings according to Qualcomm. This means that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the fastest CPU for Android-based smartphones and should be positioned between the Apple A13 and A14 CPU. It is named snapdragon 8 gen 1 and it's going to have 10 insane implications. Let us dive into it.

10. AI (Artificial Intelligence)

            I know ai has been like the industry buzzword for the last five years. I feel like I'm becoming numb from hearing it. But this is what you need to know for some time now smartphones have had traditional CPU and GPU cores but also separate ai cores which, because they're intelligent it can take the same tasks that the CPU and GPU would have had to have used large amounts of brute force to just power through and come up with clever efficient solutions. Now with this eight gen one the ai core is four times more capable than that of current high-end phones which gives it a whole new level of tasks that it can take on. It means that your next phone will be able to understand the context of your notifications and sort them into urgent and non-urgent piles. It'll be able to extract the data from an article online and before you even click it tell you if that article is going to have a positive or a negative intonation. The chip even enables real-time monitoring of your voice patterns to be able to alert you if it then detects you have health conditions like asthma or covid.

9. Power

             Probably the best example of this ai in action is gaming because there is a raw power improvement here the new chip CPU is now 20 faster than current flagships. The new graphics call the GPU is 30 faster. The bigger difference you'll notice while playing are two sneaky ai tricks.

8. Super Resolution

             See pretty much the biggest factor in how smooth the game runs is resolution. For every single frame that you see while playing your machine's graphics cores have had to very quickly figure out what pixel should be displayed where but the issue is that if you then say decide to play in 4k resolution instead of 1080p. You've got four times as many pixels that you have to sort and so the task multiplies in difficulty however with this new chip your GPU can still perform these calculations at low resolution let's say 1080p but then send these 1080p frames to the ai cores which can then intelligently upscale them into high resolution. Ones let's say in 4k so you can have the smooth frame rates of low-resolution gaming but the crisp visuals of high-resolution gaming.

7. Frame Motion Engine

         On a similar note for a game to feel smooth your phone would normally have to do all these pixel calculations 30 times per second. However, the ai is now crafty enough that instead of having to calculate 30 frames per second through brute force it can now calculate just 15 frames and use motion estimation which understands the direction things are moving in to insert intermediate frames to go in between each real frame. So this tech alone can double the frame rate of a game they can turn an unplayable 15 frames per second into a fluid 30. And hey if a game was already running smoothly well then you can instead just take half the workload off your graphics course and allow the ai to fill in the gaps you won't realize it's happening until you check your battery percentage.

6. Battery

      Now one of the big themes with this chip is efficiency. You can tell that a lot of the decisions that have been made are implicitly geared around how do we do the same task using less energy and as well as that being good. For just general well snappiness the spin-off effect should also be better battery life. You might know for example, that every current generation chip is based on a five-nanometer fabrication process. But this one is built on four nanometers. It just means that everything has been built on an even more minute scale, didn't think it could get any smaller. The way I like to think about it is as traveling down a shorter road if everything is built tighter together electrons can get to where they need to get to with less resistance thus reducing energy waste but it's not just fabrication process almost every little section of this chi has had internal optimizations to it. The point is Qualcomm is claiming significant power efficiency improvements this time around but given how crazy battery life's already gotten on phones this year even if this can translate to just a further 10 boost, this chip might be the one to permanently bury battery woes in the past.

5. Connectivity

           In 2020 for example, the best chip that you could get supported five gigabits per second. In 2021 that was lifted to 7.5 and now for phones in 2022 the snapdragon 8 gen 1 will allow for you guessed it 10 gigabits per second. It is a colossal figure but not that big of a deal for me I barely get 5g and can you even call this a village so what I'm more excited about is what they call ai antenna tuning which can boost your range. You know how your phone is lined with antenna bands right like all the way around you might have 10 different bands to improve the signal. Well, the issue is that the majority of the time depending on how you hold it you're probably blocking half of them. So, with the snapdragon 8gen1 the company's figured out a way to figure out what grip the phone is being held in and then redirect power from the antenna you're blocking to the antenna you're not.

4. Cameras

            It's time to talk about cameras because every single year smartphone makers are relying a little less on the physical lenses and sensors and a little more on the processing of what comes out of them and so the single component that's becoming the most significant is no longer the things it used to be, it's the image signal processor which hopefully to no one's surprise is what does the image processing. Well, you might want to get a seat for this the image processor on this new snapdragon 8 gen 1 chip can crunch through not 30 more camera data or even 100 more camera data. We are talking 40 000 percent more camera data than current phones 40000 percent. The implication of all this is that if more data can be processed it'll mean that when you take photos much more information about a scene can be translated to the end image so that's more detail better dynamic range furthermore stops are a dynamic range for those of you into photography more accurate colors but also probably more as a flex than anything. I'd actually use its so much data that you know how the iPhone 13 can take 12-megapixel photos right this chip gives you the capability to take 12-megapixel photos 240 times per second.

3. Video

           This also translates to the video, we've seen 8k phones before. But so far there's always been a major caveat like graininess or poor stabilization but it's looking pretty likely that in 2022 that won't be the case anymore. The snapdragon 8 gen 1 will allow phones to pump out 8k hdr 10 plus footage and it's actually recording higher than that 8k. Video is about the equivalent of a stream of continuous 33-megapixel photos but this chip can do a continuous 64-megapixel recording that's approaching 12k but what it will end up meaning is 8k with extra room around the edges to be able to crop in and improve stabilization. Oh, also you know how apple just came out with that cinematic video mode that was capped at 1080p well this also enables cinematic video at 4k. But we will have to wait and see how well companies take advantage of that.

2. Night Mode

              The crown jewel of the photography experience you've heard of night mode right when phones spend a few seconds capturing multiple frames and then fusing them together to increase brightness and reduce noise. You've probably also seen some companies labeling their improved versions of night mode a super night mode. Well, the snapdragon 8gen 1 is claiming to bring in mega night mode capable of fusing together five times more frames in the same capture time this could be amazing.

1.  Always on ISP

             So all of these cool kinds of stuff we've just talked about is being achieved through the main single image processor of this new chip. It's actually a triple ISP it's got three cores to be able to process three camera feeds at once. But the reason I'm telling you this is that probably the single coolest part of this chip is that for the first time ever there was actually a secret fourth image signal processor. It's completely separate from the part of the chip that handles the camera it actually sits in the ai section. So to put this another way this is the first time that your phones ai can use data from your camera and what makes this significant is that this fourth isp has been optimized to use almost zero power and as such can be always on. Let me give you an example of this: you know how now if you wanted to use face unlock on your phone you have to double-tap your screen or pick your phone up first right? Not anymore, because your phone can be constantly assessing camera data now you just peer over and look and equally the second you stop looking your phone will be able to lock itself you won't even realize it's happening but it means that no one else can use your phone it could actually be the beginning of the end for lock screens you won't need them anymore. It even means that if your phone notices that someone else behind you is trying to pry on your screen it can lock itself down, cool or kind of scary what do you think?

It was an amazing experience writing about this Snapdragon 8th Gen One. I especially thank Mrwhosetheboss for creating a video about it and hope you will provide comments regarding this.