It’s that time of year again. It can drop to 20 degrees on any given day, and we’re stuck indoors watching people watch as Qualcomm announces new chips and benchmark designs in sunny Hawaii. The Snapdragon Summit is the component maker’s annual chance to outline its big plans for the coming year, ahead of the holiday scrutiny and deluge of products from CES and MWC.
It’s an ideal time to pepper the industry with some news from the timeline. Many of the major manufacturers have finished announcing hardware for the year and things won’t really ramp up for another couple of months.
The big news is, of course, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. This is the chip that will power most of your flagship Android phones next year, at least until the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2 presumably starts rolling out in mid-2023 .
It’s probably no surprise to those who’ve been following the space over the past few years that Qualcomm is positioning AI/ML as the centerpiece of its latest system-on-a-chip. With the new Hex processor (which is a Qualcomm trademark) at its heart, the new system-on-a-chip promises gains of up to 4.35x for things like natural language processing.
“This is thanks to the industry’s only Micro Tile Inferencing technique so we can power features like real-time multi-language translation,” the company writes. “In other words, you can talk to a language translator and have it translate into multiple languages with these complex networks.”
Computational photography is the other big piece. The system is able to recognize and segment different aspects of an image before taking the photo. Use a portrait as an example: break the hair, clothes, background and a face into different segments. It is a feature that will undoubtedly be present in imaging products such as Portrait mode, in which depth detection is important.
The first devices with Gen 2 will arrive before the end of the year. The list of phone manufacturers registered on the SoC includes ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMAGIC, Redmi, SHARP, Sony Corporation, vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU and ZTE.
Image credits: Qualcomm
Also of note this week is the arrival of Qualcomm’s new augmented reality chip, the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1. The component is designed to power a new generation of thin AR wearables. It is a low power solution that sits on different parts of the glasses in order to better distribute their weight.
“We built Snapdragon AR2 to address the unique challenges of head-worn AR and provide industry-leading processing, AI and connectivity that can fit into an elegant form factor,” Qualcomm’s Hugo Swart said in a statement . “With the technical and physical requirements of VR/MR and AR diverging, Snapdragon AR2 represents another metaverse-defining platform in our XR portfolio to help our OEM partners revolutionize AR eyewear.”
The list of manufacturers developing hardware with the platform includes Lenovo, LG, Nreal, OPPO, Pico, QONOQ, Rokid, Sharp, TCL, Vuzix and Xiaomi.