With the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 officially announced, let’s compare it to it’s predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Let’s do a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 vs Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 comparison 

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (SD8 Gen 1) promised a lot of things but ultimately failed to live up to it’s initial promise.

As a result, Qualcomm Snapdragon fell behind into third place after being leapfrogged by MediaTek for the first time ever.

Now, Qualcomm have sought to correct all that with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (SD8 Gen 2).

So as usual, you know how I like to do it. We’ll break the comparison into:

  • Performance
  • Memory
  • Multimedia
  • Connectivity

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 vs Snapdragon 8 Gen 1

Performance

SD 8 Gen 1:

  • 1 Cortex X2 (3GHz)
  • 3 Cortex A710 (2.5GHz)
  • 4 Cortex A510 (1.8GHz)

SD 8 Gen 2:

  • 1 Cortex X3 (3.2GHz)
  • 4 Cortex A715 (2.8GHz)
  • 3 Cortex A510 (2GHz)

Whilst both SoCs are octa core SoCs, Qualcomm has gone with a different approach to the SD8 Gen 2 and I think it’s very refreshing.

They dumped the old 1+3+4 CPU configuration for a new 1+4+3 format. Which makes sense, I mean why will you dedicate a whole four A510 cores to do stuff such as Whatsapp, FB, opening pictures etc.

The SD8 Gen 1 uses one Cortex X2 (3GHz), three Cortex A710 (2.5GHz) and four Cortex A510 (1.8GHz) CPUs.

The SD8 Gen 2 uses the latest as well as more superior CPU cores that are way faster. There’s one Cortex X3 (3.2GHz), four Cortex A715 (2.8GHz) and three Cortex A510 (2GHz).

With newer, better and faster cores, the SD8 Gen 2 beats its older sibling in both speed and power.

To make things even better, Qualcomm dumped Samsung’s 4nm process for TSMC’S N4P (5nm) process.

This will ensure that the SD8 Gen 2 will go easier on the batteries of smartphones and heat less.

Hopefully Samsung’s debacle with GoS earlier this year would be a thing of the past.

GPU

  • SD 8 Gen 1: Adreno 730
  • SD 8 Gen 2: Adreno 740

For the GPU, Qualcomm has been forced to upgrade their GPU to include hardware based ray tracing. This is a trend which was started by Samsung and AMD, now ARM and Qualcomm are doing it better.

Suffice it to say that the Adreno 740 on the SD 8 Gen 2 is ahead of the 730 on the SD8 Gen 1.

Memory

The SD 8 Gen 2 comes equipped to support the latest LPDDR5X RAM with speeds of up to 4.2GHz. It also supports 4 16-bit buses for data transfer between the SoC and the RAM.

This is much faster than the older LPDDR5 RAM supported by the SD8 Gen 1 with speeds of 3.2GHz.

What this means us that multitasking, app switching and memory operations on the SD 8 Gen 2 should be smoother and faster than that of the SD 8 Gen 1.

***A lot of this however depends on the operating system software used.

Benchmarks

So if we put the gap in performance into numbers…

On AnTuTu (v9)

  • SD 8 Gen 1: 1,040,771
  • SD 8 Gen 2: 1,191,732

On Geekbench

SD 8 Gen 1

  • Single core: 1,219
  • Multi core: 3,791

SD 8 Gen 2

  • Single core: 1,483
  • Multi core: 4,742

You’ll find that the CPUs on the SD8 Gen 2 are very superior to what you have on the SD8 Gen 1.

Software Support

With Qualcomm’s excellent relationship with game developers, app developers, modders, software developers etc. You can be sure that this SoC should be very well supported all round.

Multimedia

For the multimedia aspects, there aren’t really huge leaps or advancements here. This is probably due to the fact that Qualcomm are focusing on CPU/GPU performance.

The improvements here are the SD8 Gen 2 supports UFS 4.0 while the SD8 Gen 1 supports UFS 3.1 and the SD8 Gen 2 can play 8K video back at 60FPS while the SD8 Gen 1 can only do it at 30FPS.

Both SoCs use Qualcomm’s in house Spectra ISP and Hexagon DSP. They support camera resolutions of 200MP max and video resolutions of 8K max. They also support displays of up to 3840×2160p

Connectivity

The SD8 Gen 2 makes use of the latest Snapdragon X70 modem which brings support for mmWave, midband and Sub-6GHz 5G, both SA and NSA. It also supports Cat. 24 4G, Wi-fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3.

The older SD8 Gen 2 uses the older Snapdragon X65 modem and only has support for WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2.

In conclusion…

Overall, I think Qualcomm did a good job with the SD8 Gen 2. It should hopefully rectify all the mistakes of the SD8 Gen 1 and possibly the Gen 1+

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