The debut of a new generation of the flagship chip – Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 – took place a little more than two weeks ago. The new platform is based on the new Armv9 architecture and was developed utilizing a 4 nm manufacturing technology. Samsung is in charge of its manufacture, which will continue until May or June of next year.
Will be released in May 2022
From May 2022, it is predicted that TSMC will be in charge of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 release. So that no one is confused about which chipmaker made which chip, the naming will be changed as well. According to network insiders, the CPU could be dubbed Snapdragon 8 Gen 2; nevertheless, the possibility of it being dubbed Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ cannot be ruled out.
It’s also been reported that the number of chips produced by TSMC will outnumber those produced by Samsung. This could be due to the fact that TSMC’s 4nm technology is more developed and provides better energy efficiency.
As a reminder, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 includes a more powerful Adreno graphics chip, 4x the processing power of the neural engine, the first 18-bit ISP with three modules, and support for fifth-generation networks, including the ability to download data at speeds of up to 10 Gbps over a cellular network.
Snapdragon 8 gen 1 benchmarks: graphics performance on par with apple a15 bionic
Apple introduced the A15 Bionic CPU in September, along with the iPhone 13 series of devices. Later, to compete with Apple’s platform, MediaTek and Qualcomm released their own flagship chipsets, the Dimensity 9000 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, respectively. The Adreno GPU in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is on par with Apple’s A15 Bionic graphics, according to the latest benchmarks.
IceUniverse, an insider, has released test results for the iPhone 13 Pro and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 smartphone, revealing nearly full parity between the two smartphones. In the T Rex test, the iPhone 13 Pro received 451 points, while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-based device received 450 points. This discrepancy can be traced back to a human error.
On the contrary, in the 3DMark Wild Life Unlimited test, Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 played the role of catch-up, which showed a 12% lower result.
For the first time in years, a Qualcomm chip can match the performance of an Apple product. However, you should wait until the actual Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 devices are released to see if the performance improvements are really noticeable.