Qualcomm likes to reintroduce its flagship chips every year by increasing their performance slightly and giving them a tweaked name. That trend won’t be stopping anytime soon, in case you were curious, as the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 has officially been announced a mere five months after the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 debuted.
The “Plus” doesn’t appear to be adding very much, with Qualcomm touting a 10 percent faster CPU and 10 percent faster GPU. AI performance per watt is said to see an increase of 20 percent, while power efficiency is up to 30 percent better. Qualcomm says thanks to those improvements, users should get up to an extra hour of gameplay compared to the 8 Gen 1.
Why mention gameplay specifically, you may ask? Because that’s what this chip is designed for. Over the years, Qualcomm has positioned its Plus chips as the processors for gaming phones. Already, manufacturers like Asus, Honor, Oppo, OnePlus, Lenovo, Realme, Redmi, Xiaomi, and newcomer OSOM have agreed to include the 8 Plus Gen 1 in upcoming phones, and 99 percent of them will undoubtedly be gaming phones.
The Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 comes with a lot of the same features as the 8 Gen 1, including 8K HDR video recording, Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, a 10Gbps 5G modem, and aptX Lossless audio technology. Between the two chips, you likely won’t notice almost any difference at all, aside from the most extreme conditions like heavy gaming.
Qualcomm also announced the new Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 today which seems to be the successor to the Snapdragon 780G. It offers a 20 percent bump in GPU performance, up to a 30 percent boost in general performance, and 30 percent better AI performance. It also comes with a Qualcomm Spectra triple ISP for improved continuous shooting (a first for a 7-series chip) and a Snapdragon X62 5G modem for better connectivity. So far, Honor, Oppo, and Xiaomi are committing to shipping phones with the 7 Gen 1 inside, and that list will likely grow over the coming months.
“In the mobile segment, our primary focus is to deliver new, groundbreaking features and technologies to the industry, and for our customers’ flagship devices. We implement these features first in our Snapdragon 8-series and then waterfall them down our mobile roadmap,” said Christopher Patrick, senior vice president and general manager for mobile handsets at Qualcomm. “The new Snapdragon 8+ and 7 Gen 1 both deliver breakthrough user experiences in their respective tiers.”
Devices running on the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 will start shipping in the third quarter of 2022, while those with a 7 Gen 1 inside will start shipping in the second quarter.
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