Roughly six months after Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which was their first chipset to feature the revamped naming scheme, the company is now ready to introduce two more models into the market.
In a post on Weibo, Qualcomm China has officially announced that they have a launch event on Friday, 20th May to introduce a new Snapdragon mobile platform.
Rumours heavily hint at the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 being revealed for the first time by the Chinese arm of the American company. Earlier reports had indicated that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ would be released earlier this month during the Qualcomm 5G Summit that has already ended, but that was not to be the case.
There is still much that is unknown in regard to how the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ will perform, but small performance improvements over its predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 should be expected.
GSMArena believes the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ will have a minor GPU upgrade but still use the same CPU structure as its older counterpart – one Cortex X2 prime core at 3Ghz, three Cortex A710 performance units, and four Cortex A510 efficiency cores.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was manufactured by Samsung, however, this might change with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ with TSMC rumoured to be favoured by Qualcomm over Samsung.
The change of heart by Qualcomm might stem from the fact that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has had low yields using Samsung’s process and major issues with throttling have plagued phones spotting the chipset, including the Galaxy S22.
If TSMC produces chips that are faster while also having cooler operating windows than the Samsung produced Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chips, we will likely have flagship devices that will be produced in the second half of 2022 massively outperforming those released in the earlier part of the year.
In terms of which manufacturers get to feature the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ first on their devices, the best bet is one of the Chinese OEMs consisting of Lenovo, Motorola, OnePlus, and Xiaomi. This might also be a reason the announcement for the event was made on a platform that is overwhelmingly popular in China than the rest of the world.
But still, other flagships from non-Chinese manufacturers including the next foldable devices from Samsung and the Galaxy S23 Series should also pack the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+
The other rumoured chipset set for release is the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 which is expected to be a middle-range option for powering 5G capable smartphones. It will also be the first 700 series chip featuring the new naming scheme from Qualcomm.
The Reno 8 Series, which is scheduled for release next week has been rumoured to pack the chipset on one of its offerings which are quite a few, namely, the Reno 8, Reno 8 SE, Reno 8 Pro and Reno 8 Lite.
Whether the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 will truly feature on one of the Reno 8 devices is a matter of waiting and seeing. But with the rumour originating from reliable tipster , it is highly likely that this might turn out to be the case.
The event will start at 8 PM Chinese local time(3 PM in Nairobi), therefore mark it on your calenders if you do not want to miss the launch.
