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Next wave of flagships with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 could start arriving by November
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was something of a letdown, but that was probably down to Samsung's 4nm manufacturing process. Although a possibility was raised about Arm's design being somewhat responsible, the TSMC-made Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 is proof that Qualcomm made the right call by switching to a new foundry. The company is now working on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which could arrive much earlier than expected.
Qualcomm may shake things up with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Instead of sticking with the one big core, three medium cores, and four low-power cores setup, the chip maker may go for a configuration with one Cortex-X3 core, two Cortex-A720 cores, two A710 cores, and three A510 cores.
It had been theorized that while this might not be the best approach from an efficiency viewpoint, it would help the next generation of Android phones support older apps.
A new tweet from leaker Ice Universe has proven that theory wrong - at least partially. Per the leaker, Qualcomm is hard at work on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and it will be a very impressive SoC with great power efficiency.
The tipster also says that Android vendors are already prepping phones with the new chip and it's possible that we will see the first handset with Qualcomm's next flagship chip underneath in November.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was announced on 29 November 2022, but the first phone powered by it was only released in late December, that too only in China.
A recent report had said that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 would be announced in a November event which would run from November 14-17.
Most other details - except that the chip may have the Adreno 740 GPU - are still scarce but we are interested in seeing what Qualcomm is cooking up. Apple's A Bionic chip and Google's Tensor chip both don't employ a conventional cluster layout, and phones powered by them are among the best out there. Even Samsung is reportedly considering a new approach, but the next Exynos chip is not expected anytime soon.
