The flagship Android smartphones when they appear this fall will get Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 processor, which boosts GPU performance by nearly 10% with an extra hour of battery life.
Qualcomm also announced the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, which borrows a few of the flagship features from the Snapdragon 8 series.
The Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 appears among the upcoming phones in the third quarter from OnePlus, Asus, Honor, Lenovo, Motorola, Oppo, Realme, Redmi, Vivo, Xiaomi, iQOO, Nubia, OnePlus, OSOM, RedMagic and ZTE. While Honor, OPPO and Xiaomi will use the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 starting in the second quarter.
According to Mike Roberts, Vice President of Global Product Marketing for Qualcomm, it launched the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 because it sees more consumers turning to flagship smartphones.
Flagship smartphones represent 31% of the market today, and should increase to 35% within five years.
But Qualcomm also expects 75% of total smartphone revenue to come from its flagship smartphone segment, priced over $500.
The company estimates that nearly half of the $200 billion gaming market comes from mobile games. And it seems that slavery is enough for the company to allocate more money to improving its flagship smartphones.
Qualcomm announces new processors
Qualcomm's launch of the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 processor was not in doubt, as the company previously launched Plus versions of Snapdragon processors for gaming phones, such as the Snapdragon 865 Plus it announced in July of 2020.
The Snapdragon 865 Plus uses an enhanced CPU and GPU to achieve more performance, and Qualcomm has adopted the same strategy here.
The Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 increased the frequency of the Cortex-X2 core core from 3.0 GHz to 3.2 GHz. This increased performance by 10%. The company also increased the frequency of the GPU, which boosted its performance by 10%.
Qualcomm also improved power efficiency by 30% across both the CPU and GPU, or 15% overall.
The Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 provides up to an additional 80 minutes of video streaming, or an additional 25 minutes of a 5G call, said Roberts. Other than that, the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 includes the same set of features as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
The Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 is paired with the X62 5G modem as well as the FastConnect 6900 wireless and Bluetooth system. The company also continues to make the older Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
Similarly, Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 includes an enhanced GPU that can display 20% faster graphics. It also offers 30% more AI performance compared to Snapdragon 778G.
The Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 is the first chipset in the Snapdragon 7 series to include what Qualcomm calls a triple image signal processor, or the ability to capture images from three different cameras simultaneously at a total resolution of 200 megapixels. The camera's image signal processor also supports deep learning face detection to improve authentication.