Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile SoC unveiled for flagship phones in 2023 - All you need to know

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2: Leading chip-maker Qualcomm on Tuesday announced the launch of  its latest premium mobile platform called Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 that will arrive in flagship smartphones by the end of this year to take mobile gaming to a whole new level. Powered by the most advanced Qualcomm AI Engine, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the world's most advanced 5G platform, and is tuned to support new image sensors from giants like Sony and Samsung.

The new mobile platform will be adopted by global brands, including ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG), HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMAGIC, Redmi, SHARP, Sony Corporation, vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU and ZTE.

The new chip supports Snapdragon Sound technology for premium and immersive music, calls and gaming. It features spatial audio with dynamic head-tracking for complete surround-sound immersion and support for 48kHz lossless music streaming, according to the company.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 also debuts new gaming features, including real time hardware-accelerated ray tracing that delivers life-like light, reflections and illuminations to mobile games. The upgraded Qualcomm Adreno GPU delivers up to 25 per cent faster performance and the Qualcomm 'Kryo' CPU enables up to 40 per cent more power efficiency.

"Gamers will also be able to experience photorealistic human characters in their games with the world's first mobile optimised support for Unreal Engine 5 'Metahumans Framework' on Snapdragon," the company informed. Fueled by an upgraded Qualcomm Hexagon processor, users can experience faster natural language processing with multi-language translation and advanced AI camera features.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 automatically enhances photos and videos in real time, using an AI neural network to make the camera contextually aware of faces, facial features, hair, clothes, skies and more. "The Samsung ISOCELL HP3, the first 200MP image sensor optimised for Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, will deliver professional quality photos and videos," said Qualcomm.

This is also the first Snapdragon to include an aceAV1 codec" with support for video playback up to 8K HDR at 60 frames per second This ultra-advanced platform also features the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 connectivity system, offering the lowest latency Wi-Fi 7 and dual Bluetooth connectivity.