The manufacturing giant has announced their Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 smartphone processor chip at their annual Snapdragon Tech Summit, with further details laid out in a company blog post. This follow-up to last year’s Snapdragon 888 looks to have plenty of bells and whistles underneath the hood. Aside from the new single-digit naming scheme, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the first chip from the company to use the Armv9 architecture from Arm, with an eight-core Kryo CPU that includes a primary core, three performance cores, and four efficiency cores. There’s also a new Adreno GPU, which promises 30 percent faster graphics rendering and a new control panel for fine-tuning how games run. All told, the company says the chip offers a 20 percent increase in performance and a 30 percent increase in power efficiency over last year’s model. The camera capabilities have also been significantly beefed up, bundling together under the company’s new “Snapdragon Sight” branding. There’s support for shooting in 8K video with HDR 10 Plus and shooting in 18-bit RAW, with a 3.2-gigapixel per second throughput for still images. As for AI, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 includes the company’s latest Hexagon processor and affiliated seventh-gen AI engine. The company says the increased AI horsepower allows the chip to emulate certain camera effects in real-time and allows for AI-powered sampling for increased graphics with mobile games. The chip will begin appearing in flagship Android phones in early 2022.
