Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Officially Announced, Brings Huge Performance Gains to the Table

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has finally been made official and, needless to say, it’s mighty impressive! And even though we expected no less from one of the leading semiconductor companies in the world, it’s still nice to see such mind-blowing performance gains across the board!

Whether it’ll be powerful enough to stave off Apple’s A15 Bionic and MediaTek’s upcoming Dimensity 9000 still remains to be seen, though. The ARM battle is heating up, and that means we (the consumers) will benefit the most!

In any case, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 seems well equipped for the monumental task at hand, and Qualcomm is touting exceptional improvements in basically every possible workload and use-case scenario.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get down to business!

Huge Gains Across the Board

Here’s a quick rundown of the most important bits and pieces:

• Compared to the Snapdragon 888, the 8 Gen 1’s CPU is 20% faster and 30% more power-efficient. GPU-wise, it has a whopping 30% lead over its predecessor. Incredible stuff, really.
• Much like the Dimensity 9000, it is based on ARM’s latest and greatest ARMv9 architecture and is manufactured on a 4nm node.
• It, too, will feature a singular Cortex-X2 core running at up to 3Ghz. A bunch of Cortex-A710 and A510 cores will round out the CPU cluster.
• Qualcomm is also touting 8K HDR video capture, 5x better night mode, variable rate shading support, 60% faster Vulkan performance, volumetric rendering in-game, AI-based face detection, a dedicated bokeh engine for 4K video capture, and +4 stops of dynamic range. Quite impressive, all things considered!

Closing Remarks

The biggest question now is: how hot will it run? That was the biggest weakness of its predecessor (and it was a pretty darn big one, too). It never lacked for power and, frankly, there’s no mobile game out there that the SD888 wasn’t able to handle. Nowadays, companies should focus less on sheer power and more on efficiency.

In any case, this novel Snapdragon SoC has a metric ton of promise but you’d be wise to reserve judgement until we lay our eyes on some real-world benchmarks! Fortunately, it’s only a matter of weeks at this point!