Qualcomm will be prioritizing power draw efficiency and sustained performance with the second edition of its new Snapdragon 8 chipset nomenclature that is supposed to appear in the Samsung Galaxy S23 series, report industry insiders.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 that is currently in the
Samsung Galaxy S22 series, and its
Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 upgrade, are very powerful processors, but they are also quite the power-hungry heat-generating machines, so Qualcomm will reportedly work on refining their battery consumption.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 vs Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 performance
To that end, it has allegedly reassembled those teams that worked on one of its most successful power/performance ratio chipsets – the Snapdragon 835 – which ran on the relatively modest 2.3GHz peak clock frequency, and was a power draw champ for its time.
Needless to say, the Snapdragon 835 was built on the 10nm process which now seems rather crude for today’s 4nm and, soon to be, 3nm production node standards, so Qualcomm has the chance to really iron out the performance kinks.
We can expect the
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to be built on the second-gen 4nm process in the TSMC’s foundries which should offer Qualcomm a lot of leeway to fine-tune its power consumption while keeping the performance intact.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, codenamed Kailua, has been given the model number SM8550 and the latest rumors about its composition paint a rather unusual picture. It will reportedly sport one fast Cortex-X3 core that provides a 25% performance boost over the X1 in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 models, as well as two Cortex-A715, two Cortex-A710, and three Cortex-A510.
This way, Qualcomm can turn on and off cores with much more varied power draw/performance ration envelopes, depending on the task at hand, ensuring optimal battery consumption at all times. In fact, back in May one leaker informed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 efficiency tests are going very well, and it has performed better than its direct predecessors in that respect.
The powerful Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 in the
Galaxy Z Flip 4, for instance, throttles so much under pressure due to lack of cooling space in the thin phone, that our battery benchmark tests pegged it worse in terms of power consumption during 3D gaming than the Snapdragon 888 that is in the
Z Flip 3.
Preorder the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 now
You can now book your
Galaxy Z Fold 4 or Galaxy Z Flip 4 at Samsung’s online store before their launch. The foldable phones will be released to the market on August 26, but you can score great preorder deals before that.
This could all be history with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 slated for release in the Galaxy S23 series, so we can’t wait to hear more about the processor during Qualcomm’s November 15-November 17 event where it is likely to be announced.
