Qualcomm’s New Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to Power Xiaomi and OPPO Smartphones
Qualcomm unveiled its new flagship smartphone processor – the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 – at the company’s annual Snapdragon Tech Summit held on Wednesday.
As expected, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the first chip from Qualcomm to use the latest Armv9 architecture from Arm. Additionally, the new chip jumps to a 4nm process from the current 5nm process on which the Snapdragon 888 was built. The new CPU will be 20% faster than the one in the Snapdragon 888 while also reducing power usage by up to 30%.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 features an integrated X65 5G modem, which supports both sub-6 and mmWave operations and can theoretically deliver at peak speeds of 10 Gbps. The chip is also equipped with Qualcomm’s FastConnect 6900 to deliver the world’s most advanced WiFi 6/6E.
The new chip supports Bluetooth LE Audio, which represents a major advancement over existing tech. The broadcast audio feature allows one source to broadcast one or several audio streams to an unlimited number of receivers. Stereo recording will also be supported along with voice back channels.
Qualcomm also worked to improve the security of the chip by introducing the Trust Management Engine, which will sit below the hypervisor. The Gen 1 is the first mobile chipset to support Google’s Android Ready SE standard out of the box, which means it has the capability to store things such as digital car keys and IDs.
In addition, the first batch of smartphone manufacturers to use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 were also announced at the press conference, including Black Shark, Honor, iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, realme, Redmi, Sharp, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE.
In the official information released by Qualcomm yesterday, Lei Jun, founder, Chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, appeared on the guest list of partners. At today’s Snapdragon Summit, Lei Jun officially announced that the Xiaomi 12 Series will be the world’s first smartphones powered by the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Mobile Platform.
Motorola also officially announced today that their new products to be equipped with the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will be released on December 9. OPPO later announced that their brand-new flagship products will be officially released as early as the first quarter of 2022.
