At this year’s Tech Summit from Hawaii, it’s time again for Qualcomm to unveil and detail the company’s most important launch of the year, showcasing the newest Snapdragon flagship SoC that will be powering our upcoming 2022 devices. Today, as the first of a few announcements at the event, Qualcomm is announcing the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the direct follow-up to last year’s Snapdragon 888.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 follows up its predecessors with a very obvious change in marketing and product naming, as the company is attempting to simplify its product naming and line-up. Still part of the “8 series”, meaning the highest end segment for devices, the 8 Gen 1 resets the previous three-digit naming scheme in favor of just a segment and generation number. For Qualcomm's flagship part this is pretty straightforward, but it remains to be seen what this means for the 7 and 6 series, both of which have upwards of several parts for each generation.

As for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the new chip comes with a lot of new IP: We’re seeing the new trio of Armv9 Cortex CPU cores from Arm, a whole new next-generation Adreno GPU, a massively improved imaging pipeline with lots of new features, an upgraded Hexagon NPU/DSP, integrated X65 5G modem, and all manufactured on a newer Samsung 4nm process node.

The new chip promises large increases in performance and efficiency in a lot of the processing elements, as well as new features enabling new user experiences. Let’s start over the basic specifications and drill down the details that we have on the chip:

CPUs: Cortex-X2 and Armv9 siblings

Starting off with the CPUs of the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (I’ll shorthand it as S8g1 here and there): This is Qualcomm’s first chip featuring the new Armv9 generation of CPU IPs from Arm, which includes the Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710, and Cortex-A510 in a big, middle, and little setup. Qualcomm continues to use a 1+3+4 core count, a setup that’s been relatively successful for the designers over the past few years and iterations ever since the Snapdragon 855.

The Cortex-X2 core of the new chip clocks in at 3.0GHz, which is a tad higher than the 2.84GHz clock of the X1 core on the Snapdragon 888. This was actually a bit surprising to me, as I hadn’t expected much in the way of clock increases this generation, but it’s nice to see Arm vendors now routinely achieving this. For context, MediaTek’s recently announced Dimensity 9000 achieves 3.05GHz on its X2 core, however that’s on a TSMC N4 node. In contrast, Qualcomm manufactures the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 on a Samsung 4nm node. The company wouldn’t confirm if it’s a 4LPE variant or something more custom, hence why we’re leaving it as a “4nm” node description in the specification table.

What is most surprising about the X2 core is that Qualcomm is claiming 20% faster performance or 30% power savings, the latter figure being especially intriguing. Samsung Foundry only describe a 16% reduction in power in going from a 5nm to 4nm node, and obviously 30% is significantly better than what the process node promises. We asked Qualcomm what kind of improvements lead to such a large power decrease; however, the company wouldn’t specify any details. I particularly asked if the new X2 cores have their own voltage domain (Previous Snapdragon 1+3 big+middle implementations shared the same voltage rail), but the company wouldn’t even confirm if this was the case or not. Arm had noted that the X2 can have quite lower power at the same peak performance point of the X1, if Qualcomm’s marketing materials refer to such a comparison, then the numbers might make sense.

The X2 core is configured with 1MB of L2 cache, while the three Cortex-X710 cores have 512KB each. The middle cores here are clocked slightly higher at 2.5GHz this year, a little 80MHz jump over the previous generation. Usually, the middle cores pay more attention to the power budget, so maybe this slightly increase does represent more accurately the process node improvements.

Lastly, the new chip also makes use of four Cortex-A510 cores at 1.8GHz. Unlike the Dimensity 9000 from a couple of weeks back, Qualcomm does make use of Arm’s new “merged-core” approach of the new microarchitecture, meaning that the chip actually has two Cortex-A510 complexes with two cores each, sharing a common NEON/SIMD pipeline and L2 cache. The merged core approach is meant to achieve better area efficiency. Qualcomm rationalized the approach by saying that in everyday use cases with fewer threads active and overall low activity, having a single core able to access a larger L2 cache shared by two cores can result in better performance and efficiency. Unfortunately even while making this comment, the company wouldn’t actually detail what the L2 size was, whether it’s 512KB or 256KB – if it’s the latter, then the configuration definitely isn’t as aggressive as the Dimensity 9000.

The new Armv9 CPU IPs from Arm also came with a new generation DSU (DynamiQ Shared Unit, the cluster IP) which the new Snapdragon makes use of. Qualcomm here opted for a 6MB L3 cache size, noting that this was a decision in balancing out system performance across target workloads.

As for system caches, Qualcomm mentioned that the chip remains unchanged with a 4MB cache, and the memory controllers are still 3200MHz LPDDR5 (4x 16bit channels). It’s to be noted that, as with last year’s Snapdragon 888, the CPUs no longer have access to the system cache, in order to improve DRAM latency. We can’t help but make comparisons to MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000, which likely will have worse DRAM latency, but also offer up to 14MB of shared caches to the CPUs versus just 6MB on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. How the two chips will compare to each other remains to be seen in actual commercial devices.

GPU: New Adreno architecture with no name

Back in the day, Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU architectures were easy to identify in terms of their family as well as performance levels. Particularly on the architecture side, the Adreno 600 series started off with the Adreno 630 in the Snapdragon 845 a few years ago, but unlike in previous iterations from the 400- and 500 series, we remained with that high-level description up until the Snapdragon 888 series.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 here changes things, and frankly, Qualcomm did a quite horrible job at marketing what they have this time around. The new GPU name completely drops any model number, and as such doesn’t immediately divulge that it’s part of a larger microarchitecture shift that in the past would have been marketed as a new Adreno series.

Qualcomm notes that from an extremely high-level perspective, the new GPU might look similar to the previous generations, however there are large architectural changes included that are meant to improve performance and efficiency. Qualcomm gave examples such as concurrent processing optimizations that are meant to give large boosts in performance to real-world workloads that might not directly show up in benchmarks. Another example was that the GPU’s “GMEM” saw large changes this generation, such as an increase of 33% of the cache (to 4MB), and now being both a read & write cache rather than just a writeback cache for DRAM traffic optimizations.

The high-level performance claims are 30% faster peak performance, or 25% power reduction at the same performance as the Snapdragon 888. Qualcomm also uncharacteristically commented on the situation of peak power figures and the current situation in the market. Last year, Qualcomm rationalized the Snapdragon 888’s high peak GPU power figures by noting that this is what vendors had demanded in response to what we saw from other players, notably Apple, and that vendors would be able to achieve better thermal envelopes in their devices. Arguably, this strategy ended up as being quite disastrous and negative in terms of perception for Qualcomm, and I feel that in this year’s briefing we saw Quaclomm attempt to distance themselves more from the situation, largely by outright saying that the only point of such peak performance and power figures is for vendors to achieve higher first-run benchmarking numbers.

Unfortunately, unlike Apple, who actually use their GPU’s peak performance figures in transient compute workloads such as camera processing, currently the Android ecosystem just doesn’t make any advanced use of GPU compute. This admission was actually a breath of fresh air and insight into the situation, as it’s been something I’ve especially noted in our Kirin 9000, Snapdragon 888 and Exynos 2100 and Tensor deep-dives in criticizing all the new chips. It’s an incredibly stupid situation that, as long as the media continues to put weight on peak performance figures, won’t be resolved any time soon, as the chip vendors will have a hard time saying no to their customer’s requests to operate the silicon in this way.

Qualcomm states that one way to try to alleviate this new focus on peak performance is to change the way the GPU performance and power curve behaves. The team stated that they’ve gone in to change the architecture to try to flatten the curve, to not only achieve those arguably senseless peak figures, but actually focus on making larger improvements in the 3-5W power range, a range where the Snapdragon 888 last year didn’t significantly improve upon the Snapdragon 865.

That being said, even with a 25% decrease in power at similar Snapdragon 888 performance, the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 likely still won’t be able to compete against Apple’s A14 or A15 chips. MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 also should also be notably more efficient than the new Snapdragon at equal performance levels given the claimed efficiency figures, so it still looks like Qualcomm’s choice of going with a Samsung process node, even this new 4nm one, won’t close the gap to the TSMC competitors.

Massive ISP Upgrades

I’ve been hearing for some time now that 2022 flagships will have massive camera upgrades, and the new features of the next-gen SoCs being described by MediaTek and now also Qualcomm explain why that is.

The new ISP of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 falls under a new marketing name – “Snapdragon Sight”, and includes large improvements of the capabilities of the IP blocks within the image processing chain.

The big flagship feature being advertised is the fact that the new ISP is now capable of 18-bits of color depth per channel, up from the previous generation 14-bit ISP. While mobile image sensors nowadays still are barely 12-bit native in terms of their ADCs, the ushering of new HDR techniques such as staggered HDR capture, where exposures are immediately subsequent to each other on the sensor’s readout, means that new phones now are able to capture images a lot faster, recombining them into higher bit-depth results. Particularly here, the new 18-bit ISP pipeline now allows for three exposure HDR stacking off these new sensors.

The increased bit-depth should allow for an increase of 4 stops in dynamic range (or 2^4 = 16x the range), which greatly helps with very contrasting environments and challenging lighting situations. This is quite beyond any other camera solution right now, and being able to have this implemented in such a hardware fashion sort of blurs the line between traditional image capture techniques and the more software-defined computational photography methods of the last few years.

Indeed, the new ISP architecture seems to be very much a way to implement many of the existing computational photography techniques into fixed-function blocks: there’s a new neural-net controlled 3AA (auto-exposure, auto-focus, auto-white-balance) and face detection block, which sounds eerily similar to Google’s HDRnet implementations.

Night mode is also said to be vastly improved through a new multi-frame noise reduction and image stacking block, being able to now stack and align up to 30 images, and achieve also much finer detail this generation. Qualcomm here claims up to 5x better night mode shots.

Further improvements include a new distortion correction block that’s able to now also correct for chromatic aberrations, and a hardware video Bokeh engine, being able to operate at up to 4K video recording. Think of it as the same as the new Cinematic mode on the new A15 iPhones, but not only limited to 1080p.

Qualcomm notes that all the AI/ML/neural network features on the ISP are actually run and accelerated on the ISP itself, meaning that it is not offloaded onto the Hexagon dedicated ML processing blocks or the GPU.

Just as a note- Qualcomm’s 3.2Gigapixel/s throughput metric here seems low compared to the Dimensity 9000’s 9Gpixel/s, it’s possible that the companies are advertising very different metrics, with MediaTek advertising the throughput of lower-bit depth pixels coming from the image sensors per frame, while Qualcomm quoting the full bit depth pixel processing within the ISP itself.

In terms of video encoders and decoders, the new chip allows for 8K HDR recording now, but otherwise is seemingly on par with the Snapdragon 888 media blocks. Unfortunately, this also means no AV1 decoding this year yet again. Qualcomm isn’t part of the Alliance for Open Media consortium and instead is backing VVC/H.266 and EVC, however with AV1 being actively pushed by Google and YouTube, and seeing large adoptions such as by Netflix, it’s becoming questionable for Qualcomm to still not support the format in 2022 devices.

AI Performance - Iterative, but solid

Last year’s Hexagon IP block was a very large change for the Snapdragon 888. At the time, Qualcomm moved on from a more segregated DSP/AI architecture to a single more fused-together block being able to operate on scalar, vector, and tensor operations at the same time. This year’s iteration is an improvement of that larger change. Qualcomm notes that amongst many changes, they’ve doubled up on the shared memory of the block, allowing for greater performance for larger ML models (which are growing at a very fast pace).

Qualcomm didn’t note any TOPS figures this time around, instead stating we’re seeing 2x the tensor throughput performance, and smaller increases for scalar and vector processing. They do quote a day-1 to day-1 performance increase of 4x when compared to the Snapdragon 888, via a combination of both hardware and software improvements, but of course that figure is smaller when comparing both platforms on an equal software footing.

Power efficiency for AI workloads is said to be 70% better this generation, which is actually more significant, and should help with more demanding sustained ML workloads.

X65 Modem Integrated

In terms of connectivity, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is quite straightforward, as it integrates the X65 modem IP that Qualcomm had already announced as a discrete model earlier this year.

The improvements here are the fact that it’s a 3GPP Release 16 compatible modem, including new features such as uplink carrier aggregation. Other improvements are 300MHz of Sub-6 bandwidth on 3 100MHz carriers, and an increase of the mmWave bandwidth from 800 MHz to 1000MHz, allowing a new peak theoretical downlink speeds of 10Gbps.

Conclusion & First Impressions

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is an interesting part, as it represents a fresh start for the series both in a marketing sense, and in a lesser technical sense as well. As a successor to the Snapdragon 888, the new chip  completely revamps the CPU setup to new Armv9 architectures while also bringing a very large GPU improvement, massive new camera features, and a host of other new features.

Qualcomm’s decision to streamline the naming is in my opinion not that necessary. But after the transition from the Snapdragon 865 to the 888, things had arguably already kind of jumped the shark last year, so it’s not completely unexpected. What I really don't like is Qualcomm taking a note out of Apple’s PR strategies and really diminishing the amount of technical detail disclosed, dropping even things such as the IP block generational numbering on the part of the GPU, NPU/DSP or ISP. This kind of opaqueness works for a lifestyle product company, but isn’t a great marketing strategy or look for a technology company that is supposed to pride itself on the tech it develops. Whatever the marketing aspect and shift from Qualcomm, what does matter for most of our readers is the technical side of things.

Technically, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is a larger upgrade in a lot of aspects. While Qualcomm isn’t quite as aggressive as what we saw from recent competitor announcements, the chip boasts a very strong showing on the part of the CPU configuration, featuring a new Cortex-X2 core at up to 3GHz, new Cortex-A710’s middle cores at 2.5GHz, and as well as the new A510 little cores. The performance metrics, at least on the part of the X2, look to be extremely solid, and while power efficiency is still something we’ll have to investigate in more detail in the next few weeks, is also seemingly in line, or better, than the expectations.

The new Adreno GPU really didn’t get the attention it deserved, in my opinion, as things are quite more complex than just what the presentations showcased. While we still don’t expect Qualcomm to be able to catch up with Apple or be as efficient as the upcoming MediaTek part due to lingering concerns on whether the Samsung 4nm process node is able to close the gap with the TSMC competition, the new architecture changes are significant, and we should see major improvements in performance and efficiency compared to the Snapdragon 888.

Finally, the biggest changes this generation were presented on the part of the camera and ISP system. Smartphone cameras over the last few years have seen tremendous progress in terms of capability and image quality, and rather than slowing down (in contrast to other aspects of a SoC), here it seems technology progress is still full steam ahead or even accelerating. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 ISP now features fixed function blocks for a lot of the typical “computational photography” techniques we’ve seen pioneered from the last few years, and I think this will enable for far greater camera implementations for many more vendors in 2022 flagship devices. So, while the rest of the SoC can be seen as a % gain in performance or efficiency, the new camera features are expected to really bring new innovation and experiences.

Overall, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 looks to be a very solid successor to the Snapdragon 888. And that’s what’s most important for Qualcomm: executing on developing and delivering a chip that the vast majority of vendors can rely on to implement into their devices. While the competition is diversifying and stepping up their game, it’s also going to be extremely hard to match or even surpass Qualcomm’s execution the market, and the 8 Gen 1 is unlikely to disappoint.