Qualcomm could be preparing to announce the next step for its flagship mobile platform, with the launch of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus.
The rumour, coming from a renowned leaker, suggests that the new hardware will be announced in May 2022, giving mobile device manufacturers an additional choice when building top-tier devices.
Qualcomm has been shaking up the naming around it's hardware over the last 12 months. The San Diego company wants to establish Snapdragon as a standalone brand, building on the existing reputation of its mobile hardware and strengthening its offering with addition Snapdragon-branded features, like Snapdragon Sound and Snapdragon Connect.
The change in naming for this flagship hardware also shifted, from Snapdragon 888 - announced in 2020 - to Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 announced in December 2021.
The move to Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus is rumoured to be accompanied by a shift from Samsung's 4nm process to TMSC's, as Qualcomm looks for greater efficiencies.
The incremental move to introduce new, more powerful, hardware isn't unprecedented at this level: we've previously seen Qualcomm have a mid-year refresh, allowing manufacturers to pack in the latest hardware and avoid being seen as "out of date" when coming to market later in the year.
This rumour isn't the first time we've heard about Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Plus either. An early rumour suggested that the Sony Xperia 1 IV might launch on this hardware, with the suggestion that it's already with OEMs for testing.
Typically, these incremental updates only yield a small change in performance, with the bigger steps reserved for the annual refresh which we'd expect to happen at Snapdragon Summit in December 2022. That will likely be the time that we move to the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
This is still an unverifiable rumour at the moment; for most customers, the advice is still to buy the phone you want that does what you want and not sweat the little details too much.
No comments:
Post a Comment