Snapdragon 8 Gen 1: Qualcomm unveiled its next-generation chipset for flagship Android devices and it brings improvements across the board. In a way, it is a clean break from previous designs as it switches over to the new ARMv9 instruction set and a new naming scheme. We won’t have to wait long to see it in action, the first commercially available phones with the new chip will come out before the end of the year.
Meet the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 – that’s the new naming scheme, digit for class (8 being flagship) and a generation. It is Qualcomm’s first 4nm chipset and the first to use this new generation of the CPU architecture. There is much to talk about the camera hardware, so we’ll break that out into a separate article.
The CPU maintains the three cluster design, however, the cores are now based on the ARMv9 designs. This means that the prime core is a Cortex-X2 and it will run at 3.0GHz. Backing it are three performance cores based on the Cortex-A710, those will run at 2.5GHz, and four efficiency cores based on the A510 running at 1.8GHz.
Overall, the new CPU will be 20% faster than the one in the Snapdragon 888 while also reducing power usage by up to 30%.
