Less than six months after the presentation Snapdragon 8 Generation 1Qualcomm has released an update to its flagship SoC dubbed “Plus”. New hardware comes with the promise of interesting performance improvements, as is often the case with such midterm releases. However, the most important thing is not connected with the technical characteristics themselves, but with a fundamental change in its manufacture.
Qualcomm decided to move away from Samsung and lean towards TSMC foundry services. Thus, hand in hand with the Taiwanese, it has evolved from the technical side, being able to make improvements both at the CPU and GPU levels.
It is important to note that Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 are exactly the same in almost every aspect. Where they really differ is in CPU and GPU clock speeds, and it’s not something minor.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 features a 3.0GHz Cortex-X2 core, three 2.5GHz Cortex-A710 cores, and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A510 cores. Cortex-A710 and 2.0 GHz on Cortex-A510; and this should be added 10% increase in Adreno GPU clock speed.although Qualcomm hasn’t provided more details on this yet.
As explained AnandTech, this increase in productivity is due to a change in the production line. Like its predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 was manufactured using a 4nm process, but TSMC’s efforts produced better results than Samsung’s. SoCs made by the South Korean firm have faced various shortcomings, including higher-than-expected power consumption.
In fact, Qualcomm claims that it has optimized the power consumption of the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 by 30% compared to the previous version. And while that percentage wouldn’t be entirely realistic (it doesn’t account for the SoC’s higher maximum clock speeds), it would. will consume 15% less in everyday tasks than Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
Qualcomm leans towards TSMC for Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1
Qualcomm is trusting TSMC to manufacture the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, which is a major blow to Samsung. Although, analyzing what has happened in recent months, this is not a complete surprise.
Samsung issues with 4nm process not limited to Qualcomm SoCs. The company itself has also been hit by the Exynos 2200 chip, which generated huge expectations but didn’t deliver the expected results. Recall that at the beginning of this year there were rumors that not a single mobile phone of the Galaxy S22 line would use it due to performance and temperature problems. In the end it didn’t, but the chip fell far short of the high expectations generated by its alliance with AMD.
Note also that TSMC used its 4nm process to manufacture MediaTek Dimension 9000. The mentioned SoC demonstrated amazing performance, equal or even better than landmarks Exynos 2200 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. To the point where it was even hinted that it could be part of the Galaxy S23 lineup next year. It would not be strange if this also prompted Qualcomm to outsource Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 production to the Taiwanese.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 is expected to debut this year with phones from Xiaomi, Motorola, ASUS, Realme and OnePlus, among other brands.
Source: Hiper Textual
